Revisiting the Relationship Between Autonomy and Accountability in Human Resource Management: Focusing on the Korean Education System

• In Event: Financial Aspects of Education

Proposal

INTRODUCTION
This paper examines whether increased autonomy in human resource management (HRM) enhances accountability. Specifically, we focus on the recent HRM program change in South Korea, “total ceiling expenditure,” which was implemented in 2013 by local education authorities (LEA). In the vein of New Public Management (NPM), the main purpose of total ceiling expenditure is to empower LEAs to manage human resources while reflecting the regional educational contexts.
Since the emergence of NPM in the 1980s, empowerment and autonomy of the public sector have been major issues in public administration and management (Gregory, 2009; Lægreid, 2014). Though many scholars and policymakers consider that making the public sector more independent is important (Dubnick & Yang, 2010), the relationship between autonomy and accountability in public education has not been extensively studied.
In examining the association between autonomy and accountability in HRM, this study looks at the role of autonomy in HRM. We define autonomy as LEAs’ freedom to direct HRM to achieve desired outcomes. Autonomy-centered HRM reforms in public administration and management generally provide organizations with some discretionary leeway in management (Hong, 2016).
Therefore, this study presents an important question as to how autonomy-centered HRM reform impacts on LEAs’ accountability. Specific research questions are drawn as follows: (1) Does the autonomy-centered HRM program increase LEAs’ school support? (2) Does the program impact differ based on the percentage of high-ranking officials in the LEA?
This study quantitatively tests the assumption that autonomy positively affects LEA accountability in the HRM context.
LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Human Resource Management Policy in South Korea: Total Ceiling Expenditure Program
Under the total ceiling expenditure program, total spending is set first, followed by setting the expenditure ceiling of each sector and agency for the strategic allocation of fiscal resources; then, fiscal resources are allocated by each government agency to each project below the ceiling. The program was first introduced in the public education system in 2013 as a result of adjustments made in decision-making rights related to fiscal resource allocation aimed at supporting autonomous and responsible administration by each local education authority (LEA).
The Ministry of Education notifies each LEA of its expenditure ceiling based on the local educational demand measurement, and each agency conducts human resource management below the ceiling. As the expenditure ceiling is settled through logical and strategic allocation of national and local fiscal resources from medium and long-term perspectives, each LEA must plan its budget by setting the size of the human resource allocation below the ceiling.
2. Accountability in Government’s Human Resource Management
The human resource management movement was at the forefront in pointing out the importance of structure as a determinant of organizational performance. Advocates of this approach believed that adherence to a core set of management principles would help organizations achieve optimum performance in working toward their goals. The principle of span of control, especially, holds that high-ranking officials should oversee a limited number of subordinates. Monitoring and mentoring the work of subordinates is a less daunting task when there are fewer of them, but it becomes more difficult when superiors are charged with overseeing a large number of individuals.
Urwick (1956) first claimed that as the number of subordinates under an executive’s control increases, monitoring the behavior of the subordinates becomes more difficult. As the number of high-ranking officials within an organization increases, the capacity to support local education tends to decrease. To avoid this problem, Simon suggested that organizations be designed with few organizational levels—a principle directly opposite to that implied by adherence to narrow spans of control in structuring relations between high-ranking officials and subordinates.
In brief, the relationship between span of control and accountability for any given organization should have two key characteristics. Generally, as spans of control increase, organizations gain a higher percentage of high-ranking officials, while the capacity to support local education diminishes.
METHODS
1. Data and Variables
This study constructs a unique local education government-level dataset from two important sources spanning from 2010 through 2020: the Ministry of Education and the Korean Education Development Institute. Given that autonomy-centered HRM in South Korea (total ceiling expenditure program) began in 2013, we consider the pre-treatment period to be 2010 through 2012 and the post-treatment period to be 2013 through 2020.
As we hypothesize that spans of control in educational bureaucracies significantly affect local education authority (LEA) accountability, our measure of accountability is the percentage of high-ranking officials and officials in local education as reported in the Ministry of Education data.
2. Analytic Strategy: Pre- and Post-Period Analysis
This study longitudinally observes changes in degree of support for LEA before and after the introduction of autonomy-centered HRM in 2013. Using multivariate regression weighted by number of students, this study addresses how the total ceiling expenditure program impacted the percentage of local education support officials. Using a fixed effect model, this study further analyzes whether the impact of the program differs by each incremental implementation period and schools’ high-ranking officials (% of high-ranking officials).The interaction term allows us to determine if program adoption had a differential impact for regions with larger numbers of high-ranking officials. Therefore, we include interactions to test whether the effect of autonomy HRM depends on high-ranking officials.
RESULTS
Based on the preliminary multivariate analysis, this study provides two important results regarding changes in local education support after adoption of autonomy-centered HRM.
First, the autonomy-centered HRM program significantly increased local education support across regions. Compared to the pre-stage, there was a 6.6% increase in officials for local education support after adoption of the total ceiling expenditure program. The percentage of high-ranking officials also increased by 1.7%, which is a logical result according to the control-of-span principle.
The second significant result involved interaction of program stage and percentage of high-ranking officials. While both variables of interest show positive impact on local education support, the interaction term reveals significantly negative impact, which implies the differential effect of the program due to high-ranking officials. In other words, after autonomy-centered HRM, local education support decreased as number of high-ranking officials increased.

Authors

• Hyun-Ki Shim, Korea Local Education Institute

• Woo-Cheon Jang, Chungbuk National University

• Min-Joo Rah, Chungbuk National University