Sørensen, Kresta Munkholt

Abstract Title: Employee satisfaction and efficiency in the public organisations – challenges for management strategies in social work Public organisations in Denmark are under strong pressure as a result of higher demands on efficiency and scarcity of labour. This has created new challenges for public management. For this reason the Danish government has formulated a reform to secure high standards in public management. Among other suggestions the Danish government proposes to implement management strategies developed in the private sector. On the basis of this reform the present thesis will analyse the concepts employee satisfaction and efficiency in relation to four management strategies. These concepts are selected in accordance with an understanding that employee satisfaction is necessary in order to develop good workplaces, and because efficiency is a keyword in modern management strategies. Furthermore, this thesis will query that these management strategies are developed to a sector which has very different working conditions as well as very different responsibilities in comparison with the characteristics of social work. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to investigate how the modern management strategies incorporate the concepts employee satisfaction and efficiency and what difficulties arise in the focus points of the management strategies, when the production consist of social work and takes place in the public organisations? The approach to the analysis is discourse analytic. Four management strategies are analysed in relation to the concepts employee satisfaction and efficiency as well as the concepts and phrases which the management strategies find pivotal. The four management strategies are: Results-based management, Recommendations for Public Governance (Forum for Offentlig Topledelse), Change management and Lean management. These analyses are made on the basis of theories about employee influence and employee orientation. Furthermore theories about efficiency, the public organisations as well as the street-level bureaucrats are a part of the discussion. By examining these management strategies, I have found that none of the management strategies explicitly relate to the concepts of employee satisfaction and efficiency or to the complexity which characterise social work. Therefore the difficult tasks of managing public organisations and the production of social work are not accomplishable when implementing exclusively any one of the four management strategies

Employee satisfaction and efficiency in the public organisations: - challenges for management strategies in social work

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