This book provides public admninistration instructors with a holistic South African perspective presented by means of a systems approach, the addressing of current and future distinctive issues and challenges and the presentation of specific remedies, the application of proven private sector principles to the public sector and the use of case studies to place theoretical knowledge within a practical frame of reference.
How can management make a meaningful contribution to the performance of public services? Around the world, public organizations face increasingly complex social issues related to globalization, migration, health crises, national security, and climate change. To meet these challenges, we need a better understanding of what managing for public service performance means, and what it requires from public managers and public servants. This book takes a multidisciplinary, critical, and context-sensitive approach to address such questions. Through a comparative review of public administration research, it examines a variety of management aspects such as leadership behavior, human resource management, performance, diversity, and change management. It also critically reflects on how the context of the public sector affects the management-performance relationship in democratic societies, as well as the influence of numerous stakeholders and their beliefs about the nature and purpose of public service. By clarifying conceptual issues and taking a theoretical and evidence-based approach to the relationships between management and performance, this book offers new directions for research and a framework to help improve public services in practice.
This book offers an in-depth look at developing effectiveness in the public sector and how to achieve the best possible outcomes for people rather than just good or efficient outputs. In 15 comprehensive chapters, the authors present structured ideas and practical approaches for achieving a more effective public sector. The book sets out a framework for visualising success in complex situations with multiple stakeholders. Topics include how you stimulate change and influence people to adopt changes, how you manage politics, set targets and standards, and measure them, and how you create a culture of high performance with a focus on getting the right things done. Effectiveness does not arise from excellence in one area alone and the book weaves together ideas on leadership, managing expectations, and keeping focus on the longer term. Creating an Effective Public Sector will be of interest to decision makers in the public sector, project managers working on central and local government projects, and senior civil servants. It will also be invaluable for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students studying in the fields of government, project management, and public-sector management.
A seminal figure in the field of public management, Mark H. Moore presents his summation of fifteen years of research, observation, and teaching about what public sector executives should do to improve the performance of public enterprises. Useful for both practicing public executives and those who teach them, this book explicates some of the richest of several hundred cases used at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and illuminates their broader lessons for government managers. Moore addresses four questions that have long bedeviled public administration: What should citizens and their representatives expect and demand from public executives? What sources can public managers consult to learn what is valuable for them to produce? How should public managers cope with inconsistent and fickle political mandates? How can public managers find room to innovate? Moore’s answers respond to the well-understood difficulties of managing public enterprises in modern society by recommending specific, concrete changes in the practices of individual public managers: how they envision what is valuable to produce, how they engage their political overseers, and how they deliver services and fulfill obligations to clients. Following Moore’s cases, we witness dilemmas faced by a cross-section of public managers: William Ruckelshaus and the Environmental Protection Agency; Jerome Miller and the Department of Youth Services; Miles Mahoney and the Park Plaza Redevelopment Project; David Sencer and the swine flu scare; Lee Brown and the Houston Police Department; Harry Spence and the Boston Housing Authority. Their work, together with Moore’s analysis, reveals how public managers can achieve their true goal of producing public value.
Continuously changing customer and market requirements have become a dominating factor in today’s global business environment. Enterprises have to take smart decisions and execute fast. Innovation and agility become key success factors. Process excellence is the glue that brings everything together. The Management of Process Excellence (MPE) has become a main enabler of High Performance. It leads to a functioning "Real-Time Enterprise". MPE links strategy with people and technology, like Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) or Web 2.0. Knowledge assets, such as Process Reference Models, increase productivity. Emergent Processes and Inter-enterprise Collaboration are addressed specifically. MPE delivers Process Governance for large organizations as well as for small and medium enterprises. The book addresses executives and managers as well as educators and students.
The Oxford Handbook of Talent Management offers academic researchers, advanced postgraduate students, and reflective practitioners a state-of-the-art overview of the key themes, topics, and debates in talent management. The Handbook is designed with a multi-disciplinary perspective in mind and draws upon perspectives from, inter alia, human resource management, psychology, and strategy to chart the topography of the area of talent management and to establish the base of knowledge in the field. Furthermore, each chapter concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of the area of focus. The Handbook is ambitious in its scope, with 28 chapters structured around five sections. These include the context of talent management, talent and performance, talent teams and networks, managing talent flows, and contemporary issues in talent management. Each chapter is written by a leading international scholar in the area and thus the volume represents the authoritative reference for anyone working in the area of talent management.
Confronted with rising citizen discontent, the Reinventing Government movement, and new technological challenges, public organizations everywhere are seeking means of improving their performance. Their quest is not new, rather, the concern with improving the performance of government organizations has existed since the Scientific Management Movement. Public Sector Performance brings together in a single volume the classic, enduring principles and processes that have defined the field of public sector performance, as written in the words of leading practitioners and scholars. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a performance compass for today's public managers, helping them to reconstruct the public's confidence in, and support of, government.Defined here as managing public organizations for outcomes, performance is examined in all its varied dimensions: organizing work, managing workers, measuring performance, and overcoming resistance to performance-enhancing innovations. The selected articles are interesting, thought provoking, and instructive. They are classics in that they have been widely cited in the scholarly literature and have enduring value to public managers who seek to understand the many dimensions of performance. The book is organized into three sections: Performance Foundations, Performance Strategies, and Performance Measurement. Excerpts from additional selected articles feature special topics and wisdom from performance experts.
Strategic Management in Public Services Organizations sets out to connect the two traditionally disparate academic literatures of public management and strategic management. The authors argue that some models of strategic management are now of enhanced relevance for contemporary public services organizations, especially when considering successive New Public Management reforms. This observation has important consequences for the requisite work practices, skills and knowledge bases of current public managers, as they are increasingly being asked to act as strategic as well as operational managers. Strategic Management in Public Services Organizations takes a strongly comparative and international perspective in addressing the fundamental issue of strategic management within diverse public administrative traditions. The impact of strategic management on the performance of public agencies is examined and it is argued that the appropriate use of strategic management models depends on the politico-administrative and cultural contexts of the public services organization in question, concluding that there is no single best way to strategically lead public organisations. This is an advanced textbook aimed at the postgraduate level, particularly students on MPAs and MBAs with a public sector option or MScs in Public Policy and Public Management.
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have committed to introducing agile change management for faster results with cheaper implementation at lower risk. The first hands-on guide is designed to help public sector leaders reap the rewards of agile methods, based on the latest national and international research.
