No abstract

No abstract

In recent years, public management research has made great strides in explaining the drivers of employee turnover in the public sector, with key findings related to the role of employee loyalty, organizational satisfaction, person-organization fit, and compensation. This article contributes to this growing body of literature by assessing the influence of a previously untested driver of employee turnover at the state level of government: public-private wage equity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, results suggest that public-private wage equity does not significantly influence voluntary separation rates, whereas state government unionization and the average age of state government employees are found to be indirectly related to voluntary separation. Results also point to the potential implications of ethnicity, gender, and public service motivation in state government employee turnover and provide key insights for those seeking to further understand the impact of reduced expenditures on public sector wages and shifting age distributions in public sector employment.

Given the importance of competitive public sector wage rates in the recruitment and retention of talented employees, this article seeks to shed light on the determinants of competitive state government wages. Using panel data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey, public-private wage gaps are estimated for all 50 states between 1987 and 2002, and an explanatory analysis of the determinants of statelevel public-private wage gaps is performed. Results indicate that, on average, state government employees enjoy a wage premium across the years covered, but when separated by gender, female state employees are found to experience an average wage premium, whereas male state employees are found to experience an average wage penalty. Surprisingly, state fiscal capacity is found not to influence state public-private wage gaps, but in particular cases, state unemployment, citizen liberalism, and unionization are found to be positively.

As the movement toward greater decentralization of the federal recruitment and examination process gained momentum, new innovations emerged involving the use of Internet-based technologies which hold the promise of combining the advantages of centralization and coordination with the improved efficiency and timeliness that has been sought through decentralization. One of the largest efforts to leverage these new capabilities is the federal government's Recruitment One-Stop project organized by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Recruitment One-Stop can briefly be described as an attempt to both centralize many of the government's myriad recruitment processes and leverage current technologies available to advertise, recruit and fill positions throughout the government. This article provides an analysis of the federal government's efforts to implement automated recruitment processes and discusses the implications of implementing the Recruitment One-Stop project in a decentralized personnel environment. E mployee recruitment, examination and selection are among the most essential public personnel management activities. These are the processes through which merit is measured and employees are brought into the public service. The quality of the public workforce and the effectiveness of public programs will depend, in large part, on the manner in which these core functions are performed. Under traditional civil service arrangements, much of the work associated with these tasks was the responsibility of a centralized personnel agency such as the U.S. OPM or an analogous agency in state or local government. Centralization, especially with respect to the examination of qualifications, was intended to promote equity and consistency in selection processes. Centralized systems have been disparaged, however, for the amount of delay and inefficiency they impose. 1 Line agencies, it has been argued, are better positioned than central personnel offices to design and implement job-specific examination