Human Resource Management In The New Public Management

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Human resource management can be a major factor in differentiating between successful and unsuccessful organizations. This is specifically important in the public sector. Human resource management is seen as an increasingly critical component in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness. Much of this revolves around the extent to which employees are prepared to use their discretion to serve the public’s best interests. A partnership between public sector managers and human resource management will allow for more flexibility in personnel matters and should align individual employees toward the organization’s overall mission as well. However, there appears to be a hesitation to completely abandon the traditional methods used in human …show more content…

This maintained the decentralization from earlier reforms and created a collaboration between human resources and management. Human resource professionals focus on helping management achieve organizational objectives rather than being preoccupied with enforcing rules. A controversial aspect of the NPM and strategic human resource management is the use of privatization or outsourcing. This calls for human resource functions to be performed by private organizations rather than governmental agencies (Condrey 2012, 4). A result of changes driven by the NPM, “merit, neutral competence, and professionalism all stand to lose ground under the wholesale rush toward such values as marketplace efficiency, managerial accountability for results, and executive leadership” (Thompson 2006, …show more content…

In this sense, political considerations will always trump managerial considerations. Performance-oriented changes will conflict with the interests of political actors, and those changes will be compromised and their impact dampened (Thompson 2006, 496). Systems that make performance more consequential strengthen tensions between enhancing performance and ethical public service. While merit promotes a certain ethical responsibility in which the individual employee screens directives according to whether they comply with “the public interest” (Thompson 2006,

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