Abstract
The evolution of public human resource management (PHRM) has been at the forefront of public administration research for the past two decades. Human resources in the public sector has changed from a focus on developing employee hard skills (e.g., education, training) to advancing a more soft skill approach in the workplace. The emphasis on soft skills takes a closer look at the development of interpersonal relationships (e.g., employees and managers, employees and peers) as well as self-improvement. A soft skills approach pursues managing employee behavior through motivation, commitment, and professional development. As such, the focus is on individual development as an important element to overall organizational well-being.
The Volcker Alliance highlighted the importance of soft skills for the future of public service in their recent report, “Preparing Tomorrow’s Public Service.” Results from a survey conducted by the Alliance highlight the significance of soft skills such as commitment (75% of survey respondents expect to stay in government for the long term) and motivation (71% believe they are making good progress in fulfilling their professional aspirations) in the development of future public service leaders. These respondents—a diverse group of regional, governmental, and educational professionals across the United States—also underscored how important these same soft skills are in promoting high-performance government.
Mindful of the challenges facing the public workforce, a better understanding of these soft skills and the role of research in advancing evidence-based practice should be a cornerstone of future PHRM research and practice. Advancing dialogue on human resource development for a future generation of public servants will entail: (a) empowering public servants to achieve a meaningful contribution; (b) appreciating the role behavioral science can play in eliciting meaning; and (c) understanding the role diversity plays in a demographically changing world.
Meaningful Public Service
Building the workforce of tomorrow will necessitate the development of soft skills—interpersonal effectiveness and personal resilience—as a means for overall organizational effectiveness. Yet, empowering employees and emphasizing collaboration is not enough. We must also emphasize the extent to which meaning can be attributed to one’s contribution to the greater good. Public managers will need to develop supportive managerial practices promoting employees engagement with their work—for example, listening to employees, treating them with respect, communicating expectations, and promoting growth and development. These supportive practices will be integral to the high performance workplace of the future. Likewise, an empowering leadership style can be an influential motivational tool for improving proficiency and conscientiousness among public servants; thus, positively effecting work units in public organizations. Indeed, encouraging public service and civic engagement among employees may encourage positive unintended consequences outside the workplace in local communities. The role of soft skills in employee and organizational development also transcends boundaries. The call to public service in international organizations exhibits the same altruistic, social, and extrinsic work opportunities that we see at home.
Leveraging Meaning Through Behavioral Science
How we act upon the insight gleaned from soft skill development also matters. As such, behavioral science can play an important role in eliciting meaning from soft skills and workforce performance. Policy makers, practitioners, and scholars are increasingly using behavioral science to tackle many of the important questions of public administration, management, and policy. This stream of research illustrates how cognitive biases systematically affect public policy and management decisions. Recent work in behavioral science is engaged in demonstrating how people (or employees) should behave and how they actually behave; thus, moving beyond traditional models of full rationality in decision-making. Leveraging behavioral science tools such as “nudging” may represent a means for public managers to promote soft skill behaviors within public employees that lead to improved practices and performance in the workplace.
Public employees experience the same behavioral limitations as all individuals, subjecting their decisions, and ultimately policymaking and management, to potential failure. Unwrapping the causes and consequences of the cognitive and behavioral barriers established by flawed choices is essential to ensuring the efficient and effective delivery of public goods to citizens and clients alike. Public managers must not only overcome environmental complexities, but also their own cognitive limitations and moral impasses. They must increasingly anticipate how employees will react to choices, and how to influence choices to improve outcomes, achieve agency goals, and fulfill organizational missions. Influencing public employees and their decision processes from a more informed assessment of cognitive biases has the potential to improve effectiveness through strategic choices that shape goal attainment. Such cognitive strategies have the potential to nudge public managers, employees and citizens in a direction that improves individual performance, overall productivity, and informs evidence-based policy.
From a practical standpoint, cognitive strategies to overcome these limitations come in the form of nudges—modest, cost-efficient developments in the design of options for citizens and public employees for government procedures. According to Nobel Laureates Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler who pioneered the concept of nudging, a nudge must alter behavior in a way that is predictable while not prohibiting alternatives. Accordingly, nudges must be easy, cheap to avoid, and not mandatory. Examples include graphic warnings on cigarette packs, energy efficiency labels, and nutrition information on food products. Finding methods for nudging public employees in meaningful ways offers an opportunity for scholars and practitioners alike interested in advancing PHRM.
The behavioral science movement also offers scholars a means for providing better evidence, informed by rigorous experimental designs, about what works, in which contexts, and why. The potential for behavioral science to inform workplace practices is extraordinary. Not only does behavioral applications allow us to sort through best practices, but to do so in a way that is inexpensive and easily employable. The hope is that continued use of behavioral science experimentation will lead to performance improvement in public and nonprofit agencies, while also requiring concomitant increases in public and nonprofit managers’ analytic skills or cooperative arrangements with universities, think tanks, or advocacy organizations to assist.
Building a Representative Workforce for the Future
Promoting research on diversity and inclusiveness must be a continued goal of PHRM research. Scholars and practitioners should strive toward a better understanding of the impact diversity and inclusion has on the culture of the organization, particularly, the implications for workplace climate. Interestingly, research has demonstrated the effectiveness of inclusiveness as a means for counteracting bullying, discrimination, and improving workplace climate through legitimacy, trust, and representativeness—all of which advance overall agency effectiveness.
However, more research is necessary to understanding the impact specific forms of discrimination, such as sexual harassment, have on individual psyches and overall workplace culture and climate. In 2015 alone, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recovered US$164.5 million in direct costs for workers alleging harassment. As scholars and practitioners of public administration, we have a singular duty to investigate the causes and consequences of persistent discrimination in the public workplace. Particularly salient is the cumulative effect of discrimination over time and if variation exists by type of agency.
Organized labor may also play an important role in abating discrimination in the workplace. Women typically realize equal pay and earn more under a union presence. Union oversight, although not immune to harassment, might be important to fostering a culture of recognition, reporting, and countering fears of reprisal among victims of harassment. Understanding how to create a culture of understanding and openness is important to safeguarding victims.
Making the necessary changes to prevent discrimination entails changing workplace culture, and thus rethinking training protocols. We typically view training as a tool for informing employees and upholding an organization’s legal liability. Looking back over the last 30 years, the EEOC suggests that this has largely been ineffective if not harmful. Reassessing training means providing novel ways for conveying the message of a harassment-free workplace and tailoring that message to fit a particular agency’s culture and type of employee (e.g., supervisor, subordinate). Support from the top is essential to successfully implementing new training practices and toward ensuring the success of social equity workplace initiatives. Indeed, the EEOC suggests middle-managers and first-line supervisors may be the most valuable resource in preventing and stopping harassment in public organizations.
Adopting a more inclusive vision, PHRM scholars and practitioners should continue to be a leading producer of social equity research that benefits both research and practice. The public workforce of the future demands it.
