Abstract
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The Public Administration reform, all over the world, is strongly influenced by factors like globalization, technological innovation, an efficient human resources’ management, price – efficiency relation of services etc., and the general trend is to adapt to a more and more flexible system of personnel management (respectively, civil servants), underlining mobility and professionals’ recruiting.
With all steps made by Romania in order to reform the public sector, the analyses of the past years brought into light many deficiencies, among which, in our opinion, ignoring civil servants, and especially their needs, are important.
The reform trends in public sector that emerged in the last decade were to adopt a new type of management, based on the transition from a career system to a post system – recruiting on pre-determinate jobs according to initial training, without a clear guaranty of stability or career in public sector. There was a balance between civil servants’ needs and citizens’ needs, the latter prevailing. This arise a question – do we want to change a career system, especially when the main motivation of civil servants is their jobs’ stability?
We live in a society where the number of those really involved in their activities increase rapidly. The job does not represent anymore just a source of income, but a way to accomplish dreams – career, social and professional recognition, and even power. Nowadays, the issue of work satisfaction is an omnipresent one in Romania.
What does the civil servant really want?
Increasing pressure for improving management in public sector comes from citizens and businesses. On the other hand, too much job specialization may lead to an imminent fragmentation of activities, to defining more and more specific goals and objectives and, eventually, to an inability of the public sector to adapt to the continuing economic, social and politic changes (an inability to reform public sector).
Due to their importance, civil servants should be well trained, efficient, accountable, creative, etc. However, in order to increase the attractiveness of public sector, first of all, we should identify and analyze civil servants’ needs. Finally, it is a win-win situation, where both sides will meet their interests.
Our research aims to identify civil servants’ needs; we considered such a research necessary, due to the small number of researches regarding employees’ needs from different sectors, and most of the studies were focused on employees’ motivation and motivation techniques that should be used by managers.
For our study we used a semi-structured interview based on an interview guide; we set only the issues around which the discussion will be guided (respectively, civil servants’ motivation and needs). The interview guide consisted of seven questions aimed to found the initial motivation of civil servants when choosing their present job, and the identification of their needs following the theoretical model proposed by Herzberg and collaborators.
As a result of our research, we identified some general factors that determine the attitude concerning job, activities or workplace (and thus the needs – satisfied or not) of civil servants – responsibility, work itself, work conditions, recognition, salary, supervising, human relations. On the other hand, there are specific needs of civil servants regarding career, promotion, plurality of offices, improvement and promotion of public institutions’ image and civil servants’ image in the eyes of citizens, the limitation of political involvement in public sector or the need to operate with a clear, coherent and consistent legislation.
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