Civil Service Employees Research Articles

Assessing the Temporary Use of At-will Employment for Reorganization and Workforce Reduction in Mississippi State Government

Over the past two decades, at-will employment initiatives and a wave of other reforms have taken place, aimed at enhancing the efficiency of the public sector and the control that government has over it. Administrators in the State of Mississippi have continued to propose at-will employment for state workers, at least on a temporary basis, to facilitate reorganization. This study assesses state human resource directors’ attitudes toward the incremental use of at-will employment and the terminations that have resulted from its use. The authors find that while an incremental move toward the at-will environment may produce more optimism in the perception of human resource directors regarding motivation, performance, efficiency, and value, uncertainty still remains as to whether or not the declassification of civil service employees to at-will status truly enhances public sector employee responsiveness, productivity, and management.

Mexican American Public Sector Professionals

Diversity among civil service employees, affirmative action, and workplace discrimination continue to be salient and potentially dynamic issues for public sector human resource managers. In an effort to better understand a fast-growing but rarely studied subgroup of the public workforce, this study compares Mexican American managers’ perceptions of affirmative action and workplace discrimination to those of their White and Black, non-Hispanic peers. Data for this study come from two large Southwestern United States cities, Phoenix, Arizona and San Antonio, Texas. Results from bivariate and multivariate analyses show that managers, as a collective group, do not believe affirmative action policies and workplace discrimination have affected advancement. However, when the data are disaggregated and reexamined by race or ethnicity, significant differences of opinion emerge. We find evidence that Mexican American managers perceive affirmative action policies and workplace discrimination differently than their peers.

Organizational Learning and Individual Values

This study examines the relationship between individual values and organizational learning among employees of an Israeli government ministry. The authors examined the predictive relationships between 10 individual values and organizational learning, focusing on four dimensions of organizational learning. The study sample consisted of 298 civil service employees working in one Israeli ministry. The findings showed that three values that reflect a focus on person–organization fit—namely, security, tradition, and universalism—were positively and consistently related to all dimensions of organizational learning. Other values representing a focus on the individual—power and self-direction—were negatively related to organizational learning.

Current state of the economy and Obafemi Awolowo University students’ assessment of the image of the Nigerian civil service

The objectives of this paper were three-fold. One, to examine the students’ perceptions of civil service employment in Nigeria; two, to assess influence of their perception on attitudes toward the civil Service; and three, to examine implications of emerging attitude for civil service jobs on economic development. The study adopted qualitative research technique of focus group discussion. The study revealed variations in the work plans of the students, and notably, aversion towards civil service jobs. It also examined the sustainability of the students’ negative attitude towards civil service employment. The paper concluded that the students had negative perception and image of the civil service and the emerging negative attitude could be sustained by the availability of job opportunities made possible by improvement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

Rolling Back State Civil Service Systems: Assessing the Erosion of Employee Rights and Protections, and Their Impacts

This study examines changing patterns of civil service coverage and employee job protections in U.S. state civil service systems during the period FY 1999-FY 2006. Data come from surveys of state personnel directors in 2000 and 2007 and secondary sources. Several research questions are addressed: has state civil service coverage expanded or contracted during the study period; have employee job protections increased or decreased; and how have these and other related changes affected employee turnover? Our findings show that considerable change occurred in some states during the study period, with civil service coverage both increasing and decreasing. However, not much change occurred across the states as a whole. We also found that levels and patterns of employee job protection varied across the states. Moreover, some states employ large numbers of non-classified workers, including political appointees and temporary workers, and they tend to give these employees varying levels of protection. Regression analyses show that these factors affect voluntary and involuntary turnover in interesting ways.

Business process reengineering in Ethiopian public organizations: the relationship between theory and practice

Since 1994, the government of Ethiopia has embarked on reforming its civil service organizations with the objective of improving the public sector service delivery system. The government sponsored a lot of management training programs to enhance the capacities of civil service employees and to implement Result Based Performance Management System in all of its civil service organizations. Though this brought some improvements in the performance of some civil service organizations, the effort required was too much as compared to the benefits obtained. Since 2004, the government has also endorsed Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a foundation for strengthening Result Based Performance Management System in the Civil Service. Scientific Management, Systems Theory and Operations Management are the theoretical and methodological foundations of BPR. For this reason, most corporations used BPR as transformation tool during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the characteristics of government organizations are different from corporate organizations. These distinguishing features constrain government organizations from emulating the BPR experiences of corporate ones. Hence, it is important to introduce a conceptual framework and a working model that facilitate the implementation of BPR in a particular civil service organization. Venktramen has developed the five stages of organizational transformation model. These stages are automation, horizontal integration, BPR, network redesign and organizational scope redefinition. The model helps to determine from which perspective to reengineer the processes of an organization - either to seek efficiency or to enhance capacity. Matching the statuses of civil service organizations in Ethiopia to this model indicates that BPR should be considered to seek evolutionary changes. In conclusion, considering the human resource and the technological capacities of Ethiopian civil service organizations, BPR can bring incremental benefit and evolutionary transformation instead of dramatic and radical change for foreseeable future to come. Key words: BPR, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Organization Redesign, Management Information System (MIS), Information Technology (IT) , MCB, Civil Service Organizations

Deprivation and the Development of Obesity: A Multilevel, Longitudinal Study in England

Evidence indicates that the rising trend in overweight and obesity may be stronger for people from more socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds. This study used longitudinal, multilevel data to describe trajectories of BMI for people living in more- versus less-deprived neighborhoods. Data from 2501 women and 5650 men in the Whitehall II study who were followed for up to 13 years from 1991 to 2004 were analyzed in 2009. BMI was measured on up to three occasions by a trained nurse. The Townsend index of multiple deprivation at census-ward level from the 1991 U.K. census captured neighborhood deprivation. Growth curves summarized change in BMI for men and women according to level of neighborhood deprivation, adjusted for age, individual socioeconomic position (captured by civil service employment grade), smoking status, alcohol intake, and physical activity level. Women who remained in the most-deprived neighborhoods between 1991 and 2004 had higher initial BMI and greater weight gain. Compared to those in the least-deprived neighborhoods, weight gain for a woman of average height in one of the most-deprived neighborhoods was 1.0 kg more over 10 years. Neither BMI nor change in BMI in men was associated with neighborhood deprivation. Whitehall II provides longitudinal evidence of socioeconomic differences in weight gain among middle-aged women, indicating that the neighborhood environment makes a contribution to the development of overweight and obesity.

Association of Socioeconomic Position With Health Behaviors and Mortality

Previous studies may have underestimated the contribution of health behaviors to social inequalities in mortality because health behaviors were assessed only at the baseline of the study. To examine the role of health behaviors in the association between socioeconomic position and mortality and compare whether their contribution differs when assessed at only 1 point in time with that assessed longitudinally through the follow-up period. Established in 1985, the British Whitehall II longitudinal cohort study includes 10 308 civil servants, aged 35 to 55 years, living in London, England. Analyses are based on 9590 men and women followed up for mortality until April 30, 2009. Socioeconomic position was derived from civil service employment grade (high, intermediate, and low) at baseline. Smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, and physical activity were assessed 4 times during the follow-up period. All-cause and cause-specific mortality. A total of 654 participants died during the follow-up period. In the analyses adjusted for sex and year of birth, those with the lowest socioeconomic position had 1.60 times higher risk of death from all causes than those with the highest socioeconomic position (a rate difference of 1.94/1000 person-years). This association was attenuated by 42% (95% confidence interval [CI], 21%-94%) when health behaviors assessed at baseline were entered into the model and by 72% (95% CI, 42%-154%) when they were entered as time-dependent covariates. The corresponding attenuations were 29% (95% CI, 11%-54%) and 45% (95% CI, 24%-79%) for cardiovascular mortality and 61% (95% CI, 16%-425%) and 94% (95% CI, 35%-595%) for noncancer and noncardiovascular mortality. The difference between the baseline only and repeated assessments of health behaviors was mostly due to an increased explanatory power of diet (from 7% to 17% for all-cause mortality, respectively), physical activity (from 5% to 21% for all-cause mortality), and alcohol consumption (from 3% to 12% for all-cause mortality). The role of smoking, the strongest mediator in these analyses, did not change when using baseline or repeat assessments (from 32% to 35% for all-cause mortality). In a civil service population in London, England, there was an association between socioeconomic position and mortality that was substantially accounted for by adjustment for health behaviors, particularly when the behaviors were assessed repeatedly.

"Quit stalling…!": Destiny and Destination on L.A.s Inner City Roads

If driving has today really become a Western “metaphor for being” (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming “Right lane must exit” or “Through traffic merge left”, inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel individualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, “nomad science” and “state science” (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic “amnesia of driving” (Baudrillard). Are a city’s multitudes of cars resistant “projectiles” (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic “sites of containment” (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between “untamable” democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the “masking screen of the windshield” (Virilio). As they “quit stalling”, both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad – one a driver who remains on the road but goes “under the radar”, the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films’ metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the inner-city road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control.

The role of information technology in enhancing the administrative capacity of the civil service: lessons from the USA

The New Public Management (NPM) model has inspired reforms both in the advanced as well as developing countries. However, due to the prevalence of a wide gap in administrative capacity, developing and advanced countries cannot have equal pace in implementing the NPM. The major objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the administrative capacity of a public organisation is a function of both high-level human resource capacity and the effective utilisation of Information Technology. In order to substantiate this, the paper elicited data from civil service employees in Ethiopia and USA, so that the gap analysis between the two countries can be discerned. In addition to this, the paper analyses the impact of IT on the trends of the civil service employees with different levels of capacities. The analysis led to two major findings. First, the increase in investment in IT had been negatively affecting the sizes of jobs that require low human resource capacity. Secondly, the increase in investment in IT had no impact on the size of jobs that require high-level of human resource capacity. Furthermore, the reduction in the size of the jobs that require low-level human resource capacity has an effect on the size of supervisors, which is the main proxy for measuring the hierarchical levels of an organisation. In conclusion, the experience of organisational change in developed countries such as USA can help developing countries to closely consider the dimension of information technology in the course of reforming their public service organisations.

Justiça organizacional, prazer e sofrimento no trabalho: análise de um modelo mediacional

O presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar as relações entre as percepções de justiça distributiva e as vivências de prazer e sofrimento, mediadas pelas percepções das justiças processual e interacional. Propõe testar um modelo de análise mediacional entre a variável independente - percepção de justiça distributiva -, as variáveis dependentes - vivências de prazer e sofrimento no trabalho - e as variáveis mediadoras - percepção das justiças processual e interacional. Participaram do estudo 201 trabalhadores de uma organização pública do segmento penitenciário. Os dados foram coletados por meio de um instrumento autoaplicável, contendo escalas de medida dos indicadores de prazer e sofrimento no trabalho e das percepções de justiça organizacional. Os resultados apontam que o modelo mediacional foi adequado para testar as relações entre as variáveis, sendo a justiça processual mediadora entre a justiça distributiva e a vivência de prazer; e as justiças interacional e processual, mediadoras da relação entre justiça distributiva e vivência de sofrimento.

Social Inequality in Walking Speed in Early Old Age in the Whitehall II Study

We investigated social inequalities in walking speed in early old age. Walking speed was measured by timed 8-ft (2.44 m) test in 6,345 individuals, with mean age of 61.1 (SD 6.0) years. Current or last known civil service employment grade defined socioeconomic position. Mean walking speed was 1.36 (SD 0.29) m/s in men and 1.21 (SD 0.30) in women. Average age- and ethnicity-adjusted walking speed was approximately 13% higher in the highest employment grade compared with the lowest. Based on the relative index of inequality (RII), the difference in walking speed across the social hierarchy was 0.15 m/s (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.12-0.18) in men and 0.17 m/s (0.12-0.22) in women, corresponding to an age-related difference of 18.7 (13.6-23.8) years in men and 14.9 (9.9-19.9) years in women. The RII for slow walking speed (logistic model for lowest sex-specific quartile vs others) adjusted for age, sex, and ethnicity was 3.40 (2.64-4.36). Explanatory factors for the social gradient in walking speed included Short-Form 36 physical functioning, labor market status, financial insecurity, height, and body mass index. Demographic, psychosocial, behavioral, biologic, and health factors in combination accounted for 40% of social inequality in walking speed. Social inequality in walking speed is substantial in early old age and reflects many factors beyond the direct effects of physical health.

Socioeconomic position and hypertension: a study of urban civil servants in Ghana

Background:The association of socioeconomic position and cardiovascular disease risk factors in low- and middle-income countries has not been as consistent as that reported from high-income countries.Methods:A cross-sectional study of 1015...

A View From the Corner Command Post

A View From the Corner Command Post

The Grapes of McGrath: The Supreme Court and the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations in Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath (1951)

The so-called Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post–World War II Red Scare, which has popularly—if inaccurately—become known as “McCarthyism.” Like many other elements of the Red Scare, the AGLOSO in fact predated the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the national political red-hunting scene. It originated in President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, which required all federal civil-service employees to be screened for “loyalty” and specified that one criterion to be used in determinations that “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”1 Beginning in late 1947, the federal government began publishing AGLOSO lists, which ultimately reached almost 300 organizations, without offering the targeted groups either hearings, specific charges, or advance notice. This led Washington Post editorial writer Alan Barth to term the Attorney General's AGLOSO mandate “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official” in American history, effectively allowing that official to “stigmatize” and “in effect, proscribe any organization of which he disapproves.”2 Although the only officially announced purpose of the AGLOSO was to provide guidance in federal civil-service loyalty determinations, it quickly became used by a wide variety of public and private organizations as the basis for discriminating against persons alleged to be affiliated with listed organizations and the groups themselves. Thus, it was utilized by state and local governments, the military, defense contractors, hotels, the Treasury Department (in making determinations regarding tax exemption) and the State Department (in making passport decisions), to cite only a few of many examples.3 FBI Intelligence Division official A. H. Belmont wrote to Assistant FBI Director D. M. Ladd on March 18, 1952 that AGLOSO listings had been “found from experience to have substantially impeded the effectiveness of the [designated] organization.”4 Both scholars and the general press have clearly agreed with this assessment. Various scholars have written that the AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to “an official black list”5 and “usually a kiss of death”6 to listed groups, which came to have in the public mind “authority as the definitive report on subversive organizations,” understood as a “proscription of the treasonable activity of the listed organizations”7 and the “litmus test for distinguishing between loyalty and disloyal organizations and individuals.”8 Thus, an April 28, 1949 New York Times story about the listing of additional AGLOSO organizations was headlined “Government Proscribes 36 More Groups as Subversive, 23 of Them ‘Communist,’” while a number of files related to the AGLOSO held in the Eisenhower presidential library are marked “blacklisted organizations.”9 In an article entitled “What the Attorney General's List Means,” the November, 1956 Elks Magazine began by accurately noting that “there are few Americans who have not heard of ‘the Attorney General's subversive list’” and concluded by summarizing the AGLOSO's clear message: “There is no excuse for any American citizen becoming affiliated with a group on the Attorney General's list today.”

The Grapes of McGrath: The Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations in Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath (1951)

The so-called Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post-World War II Red Scare, which has popularly—if inaccurately—become known as “McCarthyism.” Like many other elements of the Red Scare, the AGLOSO in fact predated the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the national political red-hunting scene. It originated in President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, which required all federal civil-service employees to be screened for “loyalty” and specified that one criterion to be used in determinations that “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”1 Beginning in late 1947, the federal government began publishing AGLOSO lists, which ultimately reached almost 300 organizations, without offering the targeted groups either hearings, specific charges, or advance notice. This led Washington Post editorial writer Alan Barth to term the Attorney General’s AGLOSO mandate “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official” in American history, effectively allowing that official to “stigmatize” and “in effect, proscribe any organization of which he disapproves.”2 Although the only officially announced purpose of the AGLOSO was to provide guidance in federal civil-service loyalty determinations, it quickly became used by a wide variety of public and private organizations as the basis for discriminating against persons alleged to be affiliated with listed organizations and the groups themselves. Thus, it was utilized by state and local governments, the military, defense contractors, hotels, the Treasury Department (in making determinations regarding tax exemption) and the State Department (in making passport decisions), to cite only a few of many examples.3 FBI Intelligence Division official A. H. Belmont wrote to Assistant FBI Director D. M. Ladd on March 18, 1952 that AGLOSO listings had been “found from experience to have substantially impeded the effectiveness of the [designated] organization.”4 Both scholars and the general press have clearly agreed with this assessment. Various scholars have written that the AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to “an official black list”5 and “usually a kiss of death”6 to listed groups, which came to have in the public mind “authority as the definitive report on subversive organizations,” understood as a “proscription of the treasonable activity of the listed organizations”7 and the “litmus test for distinguishing between loyalty and disloyal organizations and individuals.”8 Thus, an April 28, 1949 New York Times story about the listing of additional AGLOSO organizations was headlined “Government Proscribes 36 More Groups as Subversive, 23 of Them ‘Communist,’” while a number of files related to the AGLOSO held in the Eisenhower presidential library are marked “blacklisted organizations.”9 In an article entitled “What the Attorney General’s List Means,” the November, 1956 Elks Magazine began by accurately noting that “there are few Americans who have not heard of ‘the Attorney General’s subversive list’” and concluded by summarizing the AGLOSO’s clear message: “There is no excuse for any American citizen becoming affiliated with a group on the Attorney General’s list today.”

Civil service employment statistics 2006

This article presents a summary of annual Civil Service statistics for the year ending 30 September 2006, as published in July 2007. Previously produced by the Cabinet Office, responsibility for the collection and publication of these statistics is now with the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This transfer of responsibility was outlined in an ‘In brief’ article in the February 2007 edition of Economic & Labour Market Review. Quarterly Civil Service employment statistics are already published as part of the ONS Public Sector Employment First Release, and a work programme has been initiated to reconcile the annual and quarterly figures as much as possible. The annual Civil Service statistics provide a more detailed picture of characteristics of the Civil Service than do the quarterly figures.

Antecedents of Day-Level Proactive Behavior: A Look at Job Stressors and Positive Affect During the Workday†

This study extends research on proactive behavior at work by examining the extent to which job stressors (time pressure and situational constraints) and affective experiences during the workday are associated with proactive behaviors on the same and the following workday. Results from civil service employees who filled in surveys over 4 consecutive workdays indicated that situational constraints were positively associated with proactive behavior on the same workday. In addition, positive mood was significantly related to proactive behavior on the same and the following workday.

Adult socioeconomic position, C-reactive protein and interleukin-6 in the Whitehall II prospective study

Prior studies on the association of inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6), with socioeconomic position (SEP) have been cross-sectional. Thus, the question of whether socioeconomic differences in CRP and IL-6 change over time remains unanswered. We examined the relationship between SEP and changes over 12 years in CRP and IL-6. Data were for 4,750 middle-aged (mean 49.0 years, SD 5.9) civil servants from phases 3 and 7 of the Whitehall II study. Adult SEP was based on last known Civil Service employment grade. Covariates included sociodemographics, behavioural and biological risk factors, presence of diseases/illnesses, prescribed medications, work-related factors, labour market status and early life factors. Steep socioeconomic gradients observed at Phase 3 (p < 0.001) persisted in both CRP and IL-6 12 years later after adjustment for other risk factors. Adjustment for behavioural (diet and smoking), biological (mainly body mass index and total : HDL cholesterol ratio) and early life factors resulted in considerable attenuation but the inverse socioeconomic gradients remained statistically significant. Although CRP and IL-6 concentrations increased substantially over the 12-year period at every level of SEP, CRP and IL-6 did not change differentially according to SEP. Despite overall increases in CRP and IL6, relative differences by SEP remained unchanged so that socioeconomic gradients in both sexes persisted over the period observed.

The Impact of Discipline on the Use and Rapidity of Dismissal in State Governments

Although several studies have looked at voluntary turnover in public organizations, little research has examined involuntary turnover and average time to terminate employees in public organizations. This study focuses on the impact of a state’s discipline system on its use and rapidity of discharge of state employees. Results show that factors associated with utilization of dismissal of state employees differ from factors associated with how quickly states terminate employees. This study shows that states adopting at-will employment are no more likely to fire employees than states with civil service employment systems are, but they do terminate employment relationships more quickly.