Drivers and Performance Effects of Public Personnel’s Allocation and Stability

• In Event: Accountability and Performance

Abstract

From a traditional perspective, personnel stability is expected to allow for the development of expertise and to shield public servants from undue external political influence in policy implementation. Moreover, politicians may also have the incentives to use unstable non-tenured positions for patronage and political bargaining. Nonetheless, business-like approaches to public management conceive institutionalized stability, or tenure, as a cause of bureaucratic inflexibility, resistance to change and poor performance. Research on turnover has identified salient causes and effects of stability at the organizational, environmental, and individual levels. However, alternative operationalizations of personnel stability such as the distribution of tenured and untenured positions are underexplored. This study assesses whether political drivers and service demand explain variation in the allocation of tenured and untenured positions across field offices of a national public service organization. Moreover, this study also explores the effects of such personnel allocation on service provision performance. The ICBF is the Colombian national agency in charge of family and child protection services and directly provides a range of social services to the public through its field offices. The empirical analysis uses a panel data set of 160 ICBF field offices for the period 2013-2017. By exploring the allocation of differently stable positions, this research aims to expand our scholarly understanding of personnel stability as a key organizational feature in the public sector.

Author

• Ricardo Andres Bello-Gomez, Texas Tech University