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With their focus on private companies, histories of personnel management and human resource management have neglected the much earlier development of these practices in public sector organisations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of modern personnel management in the Australian colonial public services between 1856 and 1901 in order to set the record straight about when, why and how integrated and formal sets of personnel management practices were adopted in organisations to manage employees.

The research is based on close examination of public service legislation enacted between 1856 and 1901 in the Australian colonies, the reports of Royal Commissions and Inquiries on the public services and the evidence they gathered, and published histories on public service organisations.

This paper finds that a clear model of systematic personnel management evolved in Australia's colonial public services between 1856 and 1901. While the development and diffusion of personnel management techniques in the public sector varied considerably among the colonies in scope, nature, effectiveness and longevity, there were integrated, coherent sets of personnel policies and practices in place in several colonies several decades before their emergence in private firms.

In tracing the origins of personnel management in Australia to the colonial public services in the years following the granting of responsible government in 1856, this paper challenges the conventional understanding of personnel management as a twentieth century phenomenon of private companies.

This study seeks to investigate the nature and extent of employee retention and turnover for metropolitan police and fire departments.

In order to maximize the system production, the weakest link must be improved and all other links in the processes regulated to the speed of the weakest link. The weakest link is the constraint. In the case of public safety employee retention, there are several reasons given why employment is terminated. In order to increase the number of public safety personnel that are retained, all steps must be examined together to determine the constraint; the core problem for termination. Since the constraint is not always obvious, Goldratt developed the thinking process. This is a series of steps used to locate the constraint, determine the solution, and how to implement the solution. These steps are actually referred to as the thinking process.

Findings suggest that a proper cause and effect process will produce a desired path to change. It was determined how one type of organization could contain employee turnover by using the logic of Goldratt's thinking process.

This procedure is practical and can be applied to any problem anywhere at any time. This allows further research into other settings.

This process underscores the importance for a systematic process of problem‐solving by pin‐pointing the problem, determining a workable solution, and implementing the solution. The key is to begin by looking for the underlying causes of the problem which produces an undesirable effect. Using this structured cause and effect process, a future reality tree is then developed with the desired effect. This research reveals how the Goldratt thinking process can be applied to business problems with multiple variables.

This research is based on an actual situation in which employee retention was a problem for five years. By improving employee retention, additional human resource expenses are significantly reduced.

Through a survey of 200 employees working in five of the thirty establishments analysed in previous research about the microeconomic effects of reducing the working time (Cahier 25), the consequences on employees of such a reduction can be assessed; and relevant attitudes and aspirations better known.

Departing from a so-called “modern civil service” as an ideal type, this chapter evaluates the status of public personnel management in Latin America. Such an ideal model is considered a mix between the organizational principles of the traditional civil service and those of the new public management perspective. First, the chapter presents the different phases that public management practices have undergone in some developed countries. Secondly, following several studies and data provided by the IADB, the level of development of several civil service systems in Latin America is analyzed and several of their construction–destruction–reconstruction patterns are presented. Lastly, the cases that most approach a modern civil service are discussed and some recommendations offered to reformers in this region.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of citizens' uncivil behaviours on the turnover intention of public service personnel. It tested the moderated mediation role of job insecurity and workplace incivility. The conservation of resource (COR) theory was employed to explain the public service personnel's reactions to resource loss threats and the desire to conserve the remaining resources.

A longitudinal quantitative study design was used with a moderated mediation regression technique. Data were collected from 235 full-time public service personnel from five Indonesian public service organizations. The organizations included higher education, regional government institutions, and health, tourism, and transportation departments. All measures were valid and reliable for study purposes.

The citizen incivility's effect on turnover intention was mediated by job insecurity and moderated by workplace incivility. Citizen incivility positively influenced job insecurity only under high workplace incivility. Therefore, citizens' uncivil behaviours could not increase public service personnel's job insecurity and turnover intention without high workplace incivility.

This study contributes to the literature on citizens' incivility as a source of social stressors in Indonesian public organizations. The findings showed that citizens' hostile behaviours impact public employees' job insecurity only through workplace incivility.

This chapter assesses public administration in Paraguay. It argues that the country's public administration and public personnel structures have been shaped by a predominance of informal decision-making norms, patron–client relations, exceptional legislative interference in what elsewhere tend to be executive prerogatives, and weak accountability mechanisms of a state largely captured by a small oligarchy. In this context, administrative reform has been mostly instigated by external actors—donors and international financial institutions—and only achieved incremental progress in, in particular, the modernization of public finance institutions during periods of economic crises or political change when external demand coincided with domestic pressure. Except for some “pockets of efficiency,” Paraguay thus remains a benchmark case of a neopatrimonial state in a formally democratic Presidential system, in which informal patron–client relations trump formal bureaucratic structures—albeit one in which the legislature has exceptional influence over administrative matters and public sector jobs are exceptionally dominant in clientelist exchanges of state resources.

Effective procurement of infrastructure is partly dependent on infrastructure procurement personnel having the skills that are important for the discharge of their role. Addressing the infrastructure deficits in developing countries, therefore, calls for an understanding of the skills that are important for the discharge of the roles of public personnel that are involved in infrastructure procurement. This study aims to investigate these skills from the perspective of public infrastructure procurement personnel in the sub-Saharan African region.

A questionnaire survey of procurement personnel yielded 590 useable responses, which were analysed using t-tests and exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

EFA established eight key components of important infrastructure procurement skills to include skills related to: project success factors; social and environmental sustainability; marketing and e-procurement; project phase management, the application of procurement laws and procedures; soft skills, ICT and communication; and data analysis and team building.

The findings are crucial in developing infrastructure procurement capacity building programmes that would be appropriate for infrastructure procurement personnel in developing country contexts. Infrastructure procurement personnel ought to engage more in capacity development training that is aligned to enhancing skills within the eight components.

We examine personnel policies and careers in public agencies, particularly how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public-sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public-sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and work hard. To do so requires internal personnel policies that sort “slackers” from “zealots.” Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has little value in the private sector, and agencies where acquired expertise commands a premium in the private sector. Even with well-designed personnel policies, an inescapable trade-off between political control and expertise acquisition remains.

The mass exodus of the professional healthcare workforce has become a cankerworm for a developing nation like Nigeria, and this worsens the already depleted healthcare systems in underdeveloped nation. This study investigated the rationale behind medical workers' brain-drain syndrome and the quality healthcare delivery in the Nigerian public healthcare sector.

To stimulate an understanding of the effect of the phenomenon called brain drain, the study adopted a diagnostic research design to survey the public healthcare personnel in government hospitals. The study administered a battery of adapted research scales of different measures to confirm the variables of interest of this study on a probability sampling strategy. The study surveyed 450 public healthcare sector employees from four government hospitals to gather pertinent data. The study used a structural equation model (SEM) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to analyse the collected data from the medical personnel of government hospitals.

The findings of this study are significant as postulated. The study discovered that poor quality worklife experienced by Nigerian medical personnel was attributed to the brain-drain effect and poor healthcare delivery. The study further demonstrated that job dissatisfaction suffered among the public healthcare workforce forced the workforce to migrate to the international labour market, and this same factor is a reason for poor healthcare delivery. Lastly, the study discovered that inadequate remuneration and pay discouraged Nigerian professionals and allied healthcare workers from being productive and ultimately pushed them to the global market.

Practically, this study has shown three major elements that caused the mass movement of Nigerian healthcare personnel to other countries of the world and that seems novel given the peculiarity of the Nigerian labour market. The study is original and novel as much study has not been put forward in the public healthcare sector in Nigeria concerning this phenomenon.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the International Journal of Public Sector Management is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Culture, Strategy and Organizational Structure; Leadership, Management Styles and Decision Making; Personnel and HR Management; Training and Development; Information Technology; Marketing and Customer Service Strategy.