Managing the civil service : reform lessons from advanced industrialized countries

The paper examines current civil service management (CSM) practices in advanced industrialized countries to provide guidance for developing and transitional country governments that face the dilemma of how to recruit, retain, and motivate appropriately skilled staff at affordable costs, given a limited human resource base. Advanced industrialized country administrations are following two distinct paths to improving CSM. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are engaged in sweeping "managerialist" reforms to decentralize civil service functions and make them more responsive to the client public. By contrast, other industrialized countries, such as Singapore, have retained more traditional, largely centralized civil service structures, pursuing only incremental improvements in specific aspects of CSM. The paper speculates about what is likely to work best in developing and transitional country administrations. Centralized civil service management models provide the best starting point for most of these reforming countries because decentralized agency systems require technological and human resources beyond their capabilities. Reforming countries face trade-offs in choosing which CSM functions to strengthen first. Two functions - personnel establishment control and staff recruitment - are essential for civil service performance and should receive top priority. Senior Executive Services have proved difficult to design and implement in advanced countries, but many flaws can be corrected in adapting them to reforming countries, where there is often an urgent need to groom higher-level staff. Assuming minimal, essential levels of personnel establishment and budgetary control, unified pay and classification could be relaxed in reforming countries, following the lead of increasing numbers of advanced countries. Given the urgency of other CSM tasks, lower priority should be assigned to reform involving performance pay, the benefits of which have yet to be demonstrated in the public sectors of developed countries. The management requirements and costs of installing performance pay systems can be considerable and employees resistance may subvert such efforts. But performance-related promotion systems, even if imperfectly implemented, can help move reforming country civil service values toward standards of competence and merit.