Evaluates whether work experience in municipal or county government affects state legislators' responsiveness to local government needs; in context of devolution of responsibilities from national to state governments; Washington State.
Data from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board's First-Line Supervisors survey conducted in 1991 is investigated to assess the relative power of ratings on twelve management functions ( what managers do) and nine effectiveness characteristics ( how the work is performed) in the prediction of performance appraisal outcomes. Findings from this secondary analysis of the MSPB survey data indicate that a subset of the Office of Personnel Management's Management Excellence Inventory (MEI) provides a broadly useful foundation for public sector supervisor performance appraisal. As importantly, however, the analysis reported here also reveals some troublesome findings regarding impediments to employee empowerment and the devolution of problem solving incentives to lower levels of bureaucratic authority. There is evidence that middle managers tended to view supervisors less favorably when they took a greater strategic view and exercised more leadership initiative in problem solving. The more intrepid supervisors were indeed taking career risks (receiving lower performance ratings) by engaging in more reinvention of government than their bosses were comfortable with at the dawn of the federal reinventing government effort.
In recent decades there have been many social, economic and political changes in society which have led to an emphasis on progressive public personnel policies and management. Some of the most salient changes for public personnel policy have been the increasing number of women in the workplace, a societal emphasis on equality and diversity, the unionization of government employees, and an increasing emphasis on employee lifestyle issues. This article investigates how well county governments have responded to these new workplace dynamics and the factors associated with adaptive change. The focus of the analyses presented is the adoption of progressive personnel practices and policies such as sexual harassment prevention training and complaint processing, affirmative action recruitment, collective bargaining rights, and employee assistance policies. Based on a survey of 790 counties in 1993, the results indicate that the adoption of formal sexual harassment, affirmative action, collective bargaining, and employee assistance programs is demonstrably related to level of urbanization, the presence of a professional personnel office, size of the workforce, local-level representation of women and/ or minorities in public office, and political culture.
