Pay-for-Performance Systems in State Government: Perceptions of State Agency Personnel Managers*

Pay for performance has been a widely used method of compensation in the public sector since the early 1980s, but a growing body of research has indicated that numerous problems can be associated with the application of performance-based compensation systems In late 1993, the federal government, after years of difficulty experienced with its merit pay program, took a significant step back from pay for performance through passage of the Performance Management and Recognition System Termination Act This research seeks to determine whether state governments are becoming similarly disenchanted with pay for performance To gain insight into this question, a survey was administered to a nationwide random sample of state agency personnel management executives Results indicate that pay for performance remains as popular as ever in state government, and that nearly all of the systems in the states utilize merit pay despite difficulties often associated with that approach to pay for performance.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Technical Training in the United States Postal Service

TECHNICAL TRAINING IS MOST FREQUENTLY DISCUSSED IN THE CONTEXT OF PRIVATE SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS, AND RELATIVELY LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT ITS ROLE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS. THIS ARTICLES DESCRIBES THE ORGANIZATION AND DETAILS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNICAL TRAINING IN THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE (USPS). THE USPS OPERATES A STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNICAL TRAINING PROGRAM, ONE WHICH INCORPORATES A RANGE OF DELIVERY TECHNIQUES, INCLUDING RESIDENT TRAINING AND DISTANCE LEARNING, TO DELIVER OVER 1,800 COURSE OFFERINGS TO MORE THAN 39,000 EMPLOYEES ANNUALLY.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Why Elephants Gallop: Assessing and Predicting Organizational Performance in Federal Agencies

Hal G. Rainey and Paula Steinbauer (1999) recently proposed a theory of effective government organizations. Several other theories exist in whole or in part, but empirical testing is rare. In this article we cut to the chase and examine several key elements of these theories empirically. First, we explore the theoretical dimensions of organizational performance and derive a taxonomy to help measure the construct. Second, we draw from the literature and develop a model predicting organizational performance. Third, we operationalize and test the model with data from the 1996 Merit Principles Survey, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. In the end, this model explains 70 percent of the variation in employee perceptions of organizational performance across the twenty-three largest federal agencies. Most hypothesized relationships are confirmed. We conclude the article with a discussion of implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research

Representative Bureaucracy: Examining the Linkage between Passive and Active Representation in the Farmers Home Administration

Despite the extensive literature on representative bureaucracy, only a few studies have examined empirically whether bureaucracies with different levels of representativeness produce different policy outputs. This study adds to the growing body of empirical research by focusing on active representation of various groups of federal civil servants (African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans) in district offices of the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA). The analysis shows significant relationships between African American, Hispanic, and Asian American representation and the share of program resources allocated to those groups. The positive findings for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans suggest that these groups obtain larger allocations of resources as their representation increases, supporting the underlying assumptions of representative bureaucracy. The relationship between passive and active representation, however, is not statistically significant for Native Americans.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Opening the Door of the Computer Science Classroom: The Disciplinary Commons

... document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants’ classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions