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...1970 reduced this number 61.2 percent. (1) In 1996 P.L.104-264 removed 49,133 Federal Aviation Administration employees, (2) and in 1998 the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act (P.L. 105-206) removed another 96,949 employees. (3) By 2000, alternative pays systems covered 196,495 non-postal workers. (4) That same year, Mario Caviglia, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) official then responsible for tracking system coverage, estimated that less than 50 percent of employees were included in the traditional system based on an unpublished OPM study. In 2002, the Homeland Security Act removed 170,000 (5) employees. On November 24, 2003, P.L. 108-36 removed approximately 671,600 Defense Department employees. (6) As a result, less than 20 percent of Executive Branch employees remain under a common civil service system. (7)
The traditional civil service system, developed over time through the incremental addition of procedural requirements that ensured similar treatment of all system participants, addressed institutional values through the political process; however, this incremental procedure development process did not articulate values. In addition, although many public administration scholars provide perspectives about the values that are important for federal administrative systems in general and the civil service system in particular, the literature offers no agreement on a set of important values, and there has been little empirical research on this issue.
The purpose of this article is to explicate the most important American values from the perspective of a key stakeholder--the president as the institutional gatekeeper. Understanding important American institutional values is particularly necessary in the absence of a common civil service procedural system that implicitly addresses those values. Designers of alternative civil service systems need to be aware of important institutional values because design is a function of values embodied in the system. (8) Designers also need to ensure that the larger public accepts the policies and that the policies are technically successful, and adherence to institutional values enhances both policy acceptance and technical success. (9)
This research uses nine values that the institutional values literature finds present in all organizations. (10) The research then measures the frequency of the president's articulation of those values to rank order the importance of the values from the perspective of the American institutional gatekeeper. Finally, the article discusses the implications of the important values to the HR system designer.
Literature Review
This article uses two literature sources. The institutional values literature addresses the function of values in organizations and explains how institutional values affect the development of human resource management systems. The public administration literature offers specific information about American values and their function in the civil service environment. Both literatures assist in the development of a term list used to track values.
Institutional Values Literature
Institutional values are beliefs that endure over time about conduct or activities. These beliefs are at many societal levels, including nations and institutions. Institutions involve sets of norms assembled around important values. Institutional values derive from environmental factors (e.g., history, surroundings, resources), and acceptance of underlying perspectives by participants. Dominant institutional values exhibit four characteristics: extensiveness throughout the system, durability over a considerable period of time, intensity shown by choices and verbal affirmation, and prestige of those who espouse the values. (11)
Value changes occur slowly through feedback and self-confrontation because individuals adjust only when sensing dissonance between personal and societal values. (12) Values overlap and conflict with each other, shifting and recombining. Institutions reinterpret values during institutional decline. (13)
At the system level, values inform individuals about boundaries of acceptable behavior. (14) Behavior that can be seen and objectively measured provides cues to unconscious system values. (15) Understanding values is particularly important to HR system designers because shared values offer employees information about what is unique in their organizations. (16) New employees perform better when they understand organizational values. (17) Employees express high commitment and job satisfaction, while organizations experience less turnover when employee and organizational values are consistent. (18)
Archetype theory suggests organizations hold assumptions and parameters of the institutional archetype (i.e., the set of systems that incorporate underlying beliefs, values, and ideas) for their industry. Archetypes are stable over time. During dramatic change, organizations seek coherent structures consistent with their archetype. (19) When incoherent archetypes pull organizations in opposite directions, leaders use durable values to form decisions. These values manifest themselves through rituals or ceremonies, (20) which partly explains system change difficulty. For example, the "rule of three" was originally a way to give selection choice while setting a limit on that choice to prevent inappropriate selection criteria. (21) Over time, the "rule of three" became synonymous with merit when it was merely a ritual to enhance the likelihood of merit. While other mechanisms can honor merit, the "rule of three" ritual continued as the preferred method.
Two types of organization values exist: enacted and espoused. Enacted values involve a theory-in-use that explains behavior but which neither the institution nor the individuals may explicitly understand, e.g., the traditional federal civil service system addresses enacted values but does not tell us what those values are. Espoused values indicate those things that organizations and institutions articulate as essential, e.g., the U.S. president as institutional gatekeeper espouses his view of important American institutional values. (22) Espoused values can be found in organizational documents such as annual reports or strategic plans. (23)
As the federal government develops agency-tailored HR systems, knowledge about what values Americans hold for their institutions is essential for several reasons. Values external to an institution affect its operation and development of systems. External values limit the range of designs options. (24) Values adherence affects stakeholder perceptions of effectiveness; (25) and values allow communities to control institutions. Value linkages to respected industry organizations offer protection from threats of failure. (26) Norms justify system actions to stakeholders; stakeholders adopt values that leaders define and personalize. (27) Espoused values congruent with the surrounding culture enhance organizational reputation and strengthen external legitimacy. Values violation results in loss of credibility and relationship disengagement by those who deal with the organization. (28) Overall, the literature suggests institutional credibility requires preservation of the most important values in the design of new systems.
Multiple constituency theory addresses the importance of values to developers of new HR systems. This theory suggests HR values derive from a multiplicity of internal and external stakeholders, e.g., executives, managers, employees, unions, stockholders. Stakeholders have different and competing expectations that exert pressure on HR activities. Stakeholder differences in underlying perspectives drive the variability in...
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