Teaching Human Resource Management for Public and Nonprofit Students

Abstract

In 2011, Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs are increasingly serving students who may choose to work in a wide variety of public service settings, including various levels of government and the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit management is becoming increasingly popular in MPA programs, with the number of courses and concentrations growing across these programs (see Mirabella, 2007, for a detailed discussion of this growth). In addition, more attention is being placed on how to integrate discussions of nonprofit management into traditionally public-sector-oriented curricula (Smith, 2008). Recognizing that our students will be serving the public in a variety of settings, MPA programs are integrating nonprofit topics into many traditional MPA courses, from organization theory and management, ethics and leadership, to human resource management (HRM). The challenge for educators moving forward in serving these mixed classrooms of graduate students is to find materials that can speak evenly across both groups, providing enough substance and examples from both the public and nonprofit sector that students can apply the learned skills in their chosen context.

This review examines two textbooks in HRM, with a focus on how these textbooks serve both public and nonprofit management students. While both these works have strengths and weaknesses, in reviewing these books, several main issues are highlighted: the approach adopted by the authors for examining the process of managing people in the public and nonprofit sector, the tension of having to address two different institutional contexts in one textbook designed to be used in a single course, and the need for more sector-specific research on managing people in the nonprofit sector, in particular research that surfaces the unique challenges facing grass-roots nonprofits and those without significant HRM capacity.

Dresang, D. L. (2009). Personnel management in government agencies and nonprofit organizations (5th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Longman.

Dresang (2009) has produced a solid textbook that addresses personnel management in the public and nonprofit sector. In the introduction, Dresang uses the concept of productivity as a central tenet for understanding the personnel function, exploring how HRM is connected to and drives the process of getting people to accomplish their job requirements. He maintains that effective personnel management is a combination of skills (getting the right people in places who have the skills to meet organizational needs) and effort (motivation combined with the right working conditions) (Dresang, 2009, p.3). Dresang addresses many of the core concepts and functions in personnel management, including recruitment and selection, workforce and succession planning, compensation, training and development, labor relations, and discipline and termination. He also provides a comprehensive history of the development of the civil service structure in the public sector, presenting the stages of development and a detailed discussion of the operating structure of personnel management in government.

While this work is a textbook that could be effectively utilized in most MPA programs, it is almost too classical in its approach, as evidenced by viewing the process of managing people as personnel administration rather than HRM; this work does not capture the human capital approach to HRM. Dresang (2009) does not integrate much of the newer research on strategic human capital planning and management, a set of research that is integral for producing high performance public and nonprofit organizations (Ridder & McCandless, 2010; Selden, 2009). While Dresang does address planning for one’s workforce (one of the central concepts in strategic human capital management), this discussion lacks sufficient grounding in the strategic human capital research and also does not sufficiently address the succession planning challenges facing the nonprofit sector (see Bell, Moyers, & Wolfred, 2006). Adopting a strategic approach to managing people in the public and nonprofit sector can be essential in MPA HRM courses, as this approach focuses students on understanding how the HRM function drives the performance of a public or nonprofit organization and that the HR office is not simply the place to fill out their benefits and payroll paperwork.

Pynes, J E. (2009). Human resources management for public and nonprofit organizations: A strategic approach (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Pynes (2009) has made strategic HRM the core concept of her textbook, with the second chapter presenting the core concepts associated with strategic human capital planning and management. In addition, in her exploration of the core HRM functions (e.g., job analysis and design, compensation, recruitment and selection, performance management), she consistently focuses on how the accomplishment of these functions connects back to strategy—to the larger strategic goals of a public or nonprofit organization. Where Pynes (2009) is particular effective is in demonstrating the role that HRM can play as a strategic partner in accomplishing public purposes, whether these purposes are centered in a public or nonprofit organization. She presents the competencies required to become a strategic leader in the HR process and the steps required to bring HR to the management table and to integrate HR into the central planning and operations of public and nonprofit organizations. This approach to HRM is effective for teaching MPA students, as those students who do not plan on working directly in human resources still receive a clear foundation of the logic and rationale for including HR managers in the overall management process of a public or nonprofit organization.

Comparing the Texts

Both texts have different challenges associated with how to balance public and nonprofit content. Pynes’s (2009) work overall presents much more nonprofit content than Dresang (2009), including a chapter on volunteer management and administration, a set of practices associated with managing human capital that are not given sufficient attention in the Dresang (2009) text. Pynes (2009) balances each chapter in terms of addressing both public and nonprofit management, albeit with varying degrees of success. Some examples of successful integration of public and nonprofit issues include her discussion on performance management, which examines the difference in motivations across the sectors and her discussion on compensation, which addresses some of the particular compensation challenges in the nonprofit sector, such as executive compensation. A particularly successful chapter in terms of addressing both public and nonprofit audiences is her discussion of labor relations and collective bargaining in the public and nonprofit sector, where she contrasts the legal structure of labor relations in both sectors and provides a detailed discussion of the structure of labor relations and how the various components (e.g., union security, unit determination, scope of bargaining) compare across the public and nonprofit sectors. Union activity and collective bargaining in the nonprofit sector is an under-examined topic, making this chapter very effective for contrasting public and nonprofit working environments through the lens of labor relations.

While Pynes (2009) is effective in presenting the core concepts of HRM for both audiences, the textbook has some weaknesses in reference to some of the more detailed historical and foundational information that is important for teaching HRM for both groups. The introductory chapter provides background on public and nonprofit employment but does not provide the necessary depth of information required to convey a full understanding of the development of the civil service system at the federal, state, and local levels that is provided through other public-sector-centered HRM texts and, as stated earlier, is comprehensively addressed in Dresang (2009). Understanding the evolution of the federal civil service system, from fitness of character to patronage to merit, the associated tension of balancing competing public service values, and how this evolution influenced civil service structures at other levels of government, is an integral learning objective for HRM courses preparing public managers. The lack of detail on this topic highlights one of the central challenges of teaching HRM to a mixed audience of students—What may be integral to one set of students may be less so to the other group of students.

In terms of the foundational information on managing people in the public and nonprofit sector, scholars seeking to produce work that addresses both audiences and can be used in classes composed of both sets of students are forced to make deliberate choices about how to balance these contexts, sometimes in ways that may not satisfy particular audiences. For those seeking a MPA who are determined to work in the nonprofit sector, convincing these students as to why they need to know a detailed history of the civil service is a mighty task. Pynes (2009), with deliberation, has reduced some of this history to balance the needs of both sets of students. As such, assigning this text in a HRM class for public and nonprofit students would require some supplemental information on the history of the civil service. While Dresang (2009) addresses the civil service in detail in the early section of his textbook in great detail, he does not provide the same level of detail on the background and structure of the nonprofit sector as Pynes (2009), requiring supplemental material and again demonstrating that it is a difficult challenge to balance depth and breadth of content when addressing both public and nonprofit students of HRM.

In reviewing these books from the perspective of one who teaches mixed classes of public and nonprofit students of HRM and organization theory, this review raised the question of whether MPA programs are doing a disservice to our students by seeking to combine public and nonprofit topics in many of the core management classes. Organizational theory is a course that lends itself well to the comparison of public and nonprofit organizations across central concepts such as structure, design, operation, and culture. However, in other areas of management, such as HRM, public administration professors need to reflect on whether we are combining apples and oranges. The historical and institutional contexts of managing people in the public and nonprofit sector are very different—Covering both sets of information in the detail that would be sufficient to give students a full understanding would inevitably lead to less focus on the core functional processes of HRM, a compromise that is less than ideal. Reducing the level of content to briefly address both institutional contexts could lead to problems with fully understanding how the HR functions work in practice in the different sectors, as institutional context can have a significant impact on how well HR operates in government and the nonprofit sector. Recognizing the practical constraints in terms of course sizes, faculty capacity, and university requirements, the future of teaching HRM in MPA programs may be to offer separate sections geared specifically to either public or nonprofit audiences.

In reviewing these texts, the need for more and better empirical research on HRM practices in the nonprofit sector was also highlighted, to better compare the reality of managing people in the public service broadly constructed and to advance the overall knowledge base on managing human resources in the public service. Scholars have developed a solid knowledge base on compensation in the nonprofit sector, work motivations in the nonprofit sector, and the practice of managing volunteers (see Ben-Ner, Ren, & Paulson, 2011; Brown & Yoshioka, 2003; Haley-Lock, 2009; Handy, Mook, & Quarter, 2008; Liao-Troth, 2001; Mason, 1996). However, there still exists a significant knowledge gap in terms of knowledge of overall HR capacity, performance management, and career development practices in the nonprofit sector, especially in smaller and grass-roots nonprofit organizations.

Larger nonprofit organizations, such as universities, hospitals, and larger human service providers, may be more likely to have developed HRM infrastructures, thereby making it easier to apply existing HR studies and theories to this segment of the nonprofit sector. We need to build more systematic evidence of HR capacity in smaller nonprofits—How many have dedicated HR staff? How many have current policies, job descriptions, and evaluation practices? We need to build better data on the overall starting point of HR capacity in this large section of the nonprofit sector if we are to educate students on how to work in and eventually lead these organizations. We need to document the challenges that smaller nonprofit organizations face in terms of their human capital—How do you retain staff when you have restricted career ladders, pay and benefits, and opportunities for growth? How do you design staffing and compensation models that account for restricted capacity, resources, and normative pressures to keep expenditures on management low? More and better research on the realities of managing people in smaller nonprofit organizations will allow for better comparisons of the differences in managing people in the public versus nonprofit sector and better recommendations for our students in terms of how to handle the many HR dilemmas experienced in practice.

Conclusion

Reviewing the textbooks of Dresang (2009) and Pynes (2009) with a focus on how these texts could be used in MPA HRM courses demonstrated some unanswered questions, including what are the various underlying concepts or theories through which one examines the practice of public service HRM, the challenge of determining how to balance breadth and depth in teaching HRM in public and nonprofit organizations, and the need to do more research on HR capacity and practice in smaller nonprofit organizations to enrich the HR knowledge base and the ability to prepare our students for managing people in nonprofit organizations with restricted capacity and resource bases. As interest in nonprofit management continues to grow in graduate public service programs across the United States, it would not be surprising to see these issues revisited in the future.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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