The Reformer's Spirit: How Public Administrators Fuel Training in the Skills of Good Governance

Abstract

The public administration literature has long identified public administrators as key players in achieving government reform. Public managers may be motivated to provide employee access to training in governance skills by several factors, including the need to fulfill the current functions of government, to expand employee responsibilities, or to reform administrative processes and/or programs. The authors examine the impact of public managers on the availability of governance skills training by observing how the desire to achieve reform influences their training decisions in light of other motivating factors. They find that training in citizen input, client relations, and performance indicators are significantly and substantively more prevalent in organizations when public managers believe that such training is necessary for reform, and that the more “democratic” a skill, the more likely a reform motivation will outweigh other factors.

Reforming the Public Sector in Eastern European and Former Soviet Union Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Interestingly, papers including a positivist paradigm were prevalent. Using a range of theories, these papers studied public sector developments by adopting the following approaches: political economy (Rinnert, 2015), new institutional economics (Raudla, 2013), market orientation in the public sector (Kowalik, 2011), fiscal decentralization (Guess, 2007) and initiatives for conducting public sector reform (Witesman & Wise, 2012). Surprisingly, few papers used interpretive paradigms; those that employed public choice theory (Nemec, Merickova, & Vitek, 2005), new institutional theory (Schnell, 2015), and theory on policy implementation (O'Toole, 1994).…”

“…Specific attention here was given to privatization features in EE and FSU countries (Savas, 1992;O'Toole, 1994). Papers investigating transformations associated with public sector employees focused directly on civil service reform (Condrey et al, 2001;Neshkova & Kostadinova, 2012) or HRM reform (Common, 2011) or emphasized either the role of public administrators, their behavior, and readiness to implement reforms (Witesman & Wise, 2012) or the importance of "realignments of the mind sets and skill requisites" of civil servants (Saner & Yiu, 1966, p. 61).…”

The effects of legal versus business education on decision making in public administrations with a Weberian tradition

“…To our knowledge, previous studies that analysed the effects of education on the decision making of public servants focused only on the impact of short-term training for public servants (Kroll and Moynihan 2015;Witesman and Wise 2012;Cavalluzzo and Ittner 2004). We assume that a multi-year, full-time university education has a greater impact on an individual's values and his/her mindset than short-term training programmes completed after joining the workforce of public institutions.…”