Human Resource Management in Public Organizations

The terms public personnel administration (PPA) and human resources development (HRD) are used to describe various personnel functions.
Training, staff development, and virtual learning are increasingly necessary to improve service quality and productivity in complex public organizations. Public personnel administration (PPA) are policies, processes, and procedures designed to recruit, train, and promote people who manage government agencies. Human resources development (HRD) is the training and staff development of public employees designed to improve job performance.

In the public sector, these functions differ from those in business and industry in important respects. Most prominently, the need to conduct personnel administration within constraints set by other formal political institutions, agencies and other interest groups, and by political parties and the mass media. Today, PPA and HRD are no longer regarded as separate from the general processes of public-policy making and performance management. There are two reasons for this. First, decisions made in the personnel area have a direct bearing on who makes and implements government policies.

Second, such decisions have themselves become policy matters, reflecting demands for effective program administration, improved productivity, employee rights, collective bargaining agreements, and traditional merit reforms. To a great extent, personnel policies and training practices have become an extension of partisan political value conflicts, and the political dimension of PPA and HRD has taken on increasing importance in recent years.

The sheer diversity, size, and scope of contemporary government make human resources and personnel concerns more important than ever before. Although the issue of “big government” is not directly tied to personnel policies, political pressures for reducing or controlling bureaucratic size affect personnel administrators and many of their decisions. The public and private sectors are increasingly dependent upon one another for joint missions, mutual responsibilities, and financial support.