Personnel Management by Whose Objectives?

Abstract

Public personnel management, as a field of public administration, has undergone considerable development in the past 40 years. Personnel professionals now have available a wide range of techniques which they can apply toward the efficient acquisition, allocation, and development of human resources-human resource planning, job analysis, selection, appraisal, training, and labor-management relations. The rapid development of these techniques signifies the increasing acceptance of rational, scientific problem-solving over previous methods of dealing with employees. However, the advance of rational personnel management has occurred at a cost: by emphasizing the one best way to complete a task, personnel professionals have ignored the diversity that exists in reality. Specifically, they have tended to overlook the impact that different organizational objectives and environments have on the effectiveness of personnel management techniques. As a result, many consequences of personnel techniques which affect employees, organization and environment are defined as falling outside the study and practice of personnel management. Ideas and concepts drawn from the literature of organization theory and administrative behavior furnish the opportunity to develop a dynamic and realistic view of personnel management. We approach the problem of developing a new theoretical framework in three segments: