Public Sector Human Resources

Human resource management (HRM, or simply HR) is a function in organizations designed to maximize employee performance in service of their employer's strategic objectives. (HRM in changing organizational contexts, 2009). HR is primarily concerned with how people are managed within organizations, focusing on policies and systems ( Human resource management: A critical approach , 2009). HR departments and units in organizations are typically responsible for a number of activities, including employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and rewarding. HR is also concerned with industrial relations, that is, the balancing of organizational practices with regulations arising from collective bargaining and governmental laws.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy-making, with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy-making, and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions surrounding the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or as a technological enabler and investigates the current trends and future directions of crowdsourcing.

Citizens and public organisations are increasingly engaging in the co-creation of public services. To be successful, such co-creation efforts require public organisations to engage in organisational learning about citizens' value-creation processes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of such organisational learning, drawing on Payne, Storbacka, and Frow's framework about value co-creation management. A model consisting of five factors is suggested and tested via a survey administered to a sample of 204 local government administrators in Italy. The findings highlight the significance of two positive antecedents (public administrators' level of citizen orientation and expected benefits from co-creation) and three negative antecedents (perceived citizens' lack of competencies and experience, perceived biases in citizens' perceptions, and lack of resources) of organisational learning. From the managerial perspective, the model tested in this study can be used by public organisations to evaluate their level of organisational learning.

Most supervisors dread employee discipline and often employ strategies not officially sanctioned by the organization. Poorly designed discipline systems cause this variation in discipline practices. Inconsistent discipline can cause losses in productivity and reduce employee morale. Extant literature offers little in the form of guidance for improving this important human resource activity. This article explore where normative literature on organizational culture may have explanatory value for understanding variation in discipline practices. The article suggests two groups of factors that have causal effects on discipline practices. The tangible factors are those describing the formal practices the organization wishes its employees to follow. The intangible factors provide cues for explaining why informal strategies emerge as successful practices for getting things done. Using this conception of organization culture, the article proposes hypotheses for future testing to validate the suspected influence of culture on decisions regarding employee discipline.

Leadership is deeply attached to culture. This study compares leadership styles in Thai and Australian public sectors. The data were collected from staff in public sector settings in Australia and Thailand. The results confirm four leadership styles that suit the public sector culture in both countries: communication-oriented, strategic thinking and planning, relationship building, and conflict management. In the Thai public sector system, leadership that focuses on goal orientation is ranked most highly: Australian public sector organisations focus on leadership that fosters equity among organisational members, creates a supportive environment in the workplace, and facilitates participation. It is evident from this study that significant distinctions between the organisational cultures of Thailand and Australia are matched by marked dissimilarities of preferred leadership styles. Thus, an understanding of local organisational culture is important for effective leadership at all levels.

The first purpose of this paper is to describe the personality traits of an ideal employee. The literature indicates there are five identifiable personality traits that should be assessed during the hiring process. The traits are conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness to experience. Second, this research describes the extent to which cities in central Texas use hiring processes that take into account an employee’s personality traits. Data from a questionnaire sent to human resources directors in central Texas cities are used. The directors were asked about using personality assessments during the hiring process. The data reveal that a majority of cities do not administer personality tests during the hiring process. The research presented in this paper is helpful for human resource directors because it reviews the literature that explains why incorporating personality assessments in the hiring process helps put the right person in the right position.

Recently different forms of evaluation for Performance-Related Pay have been growing up and exploited in the Public Sector. Many experiences and normative efforts in Italy as abroad, however, don’t stress enough the intrinsic results and suggestions of evaluation which could lead to targeted improvement plans on an individual and organizational basis.
This paper intends to provide examples and proposals on how to exploit the results from evaluation and the application of Performance-Related Pay approaches, incrementing the value and potential of a local body by means of incremental plans and continuous improvement.
In this line, the relationship between the individual and organizational performance is explored through an epistemological perspective on performance to highlight how the levers for innovation and development in the public sector today mainly relay on the professionalization of human resources and its capability of openness and flexibility. The application and translation in Public Sector of the open innovation in the Human Resources Development is proposed, enhancing both the citizen-oriented perspective and the absorptive capacity model driven form the theory of organizational capacity (capability theory).
A truth table based on 45 case studies from the Italian and international context will be presented with its tips for success and four cases will be provided in order to strengthen the final section which will propose future steps to be taken in order to improve individual and organizational performance in Public Sector.

This study investigates the relationship between family-friendly policies and organizational performance, voluntary turnover rate, and labor productivity, using the Korea Workplace Panel Survey data from 2005 to 2009. The sample of this study consists of 158 public organizations in South Korea. This study uses panel data analysis to estimate the family-friendly policy effect. The result of the analysis suggests that the number of family-friendly policies is positively associated with labor productivity in public organizations. However, the number of family-friendly policies does not reduce the turnover rate. In addition, unionization has shown to decrease turnover rate and is positively associated with labor productivity in public organizations. The proportion of female workers has a positive relationship with turnover rate in organizations.

In this research, the author has elaborated on detection of effective factors on maintenance and retention of human resources. Since human resources are the most resources for obtaining competitive advantage, it is essential to pay attention to different dimensions of human resources management. One of these dimensions is retention of human resources. Factors such as providing correct and valid information at the time of recruitment, assigning tasks based on competence, existence of a clear career, having a suitable evaluation system and effective reward systems are effective in terms of retention and maintenance of human resources.

Th is pay policy is an organisational development (OD) intervention that aimed at ensuring internal and external pay equity. Th is process culminated in the design of the single spine pay policy whose implementation commenced in January 2010. Th e implementation has not been without its challenges; this resulted in a calling of a national forum on the sustainability of the new pay policy. It is against this backdrop that this paper sought to review the implementation of the single spine pay policy (SSPP) in the public sector within an OD and intervention perspective. Specifi cally, this paper pointed out that SSPP reforms constitute a re-creation, a reactive but a discontinuous change. As a result, its implementation was explored in the light of Lewinian three-stage model of organizational change; it further assessed the implementation against its main objectives whiles identifying some of its challenges. In addition, recommendations were also presented for further improvement of the pay policy. It was concluded that the implementation has been partially successful and when given the needed support it would achieve its objectives and be sustainable in the long-run.

This study explores how Human Resources (HR) environment (i.e., job autonomy, opportunities for advancement, involved communication, and decisive action) promotes psychological well-being of public employees. We advance the literature by identifying organizational identification (OID) as the underpinning mechanism through which HR environment can foster employees' well-being. OID is termed as a "social cure," owing to its strong link with employee health and well-being. The results of structural equation modeling show a positive association among HR practices and OID, which subsequently enhances well-being of public sector employees. Managerial implications for public sector leaders are discussed in detail.

Purpose – Attempts to modernise the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK involve promoting flexible approaches to work and training, restructuring postgraduate training and increasing control and scrutiny of doctors' work. However, the medical community has responded with expressed anxiety about the implications of these changes for medical professionalism and the quality of patient care. This paper aims to address these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on literature on nostalgia, gender, identity and organisations, the paper explores the narratives of 20 senior NHS hospital doctors to identify ways in which doctors use nostalgia to react to organisational and professional challenges and resist modernisation and feminisation of medicine.

Findings – This paper illustrates how senior hospital doctors' nostalgic discourses of temporal commitment may be used to constitute a highly esteemed professional identity, creating a sense of personal and occupational uniqueness for senior hospital doctors, intertwined with gendered forms of othering and exclusionary practices.

Practical implications – Nostalgia at first sight appears to be an innocuous social construct. However, this study illustrates the significance of nostalgia as a subversive practice of resistance with implications for women's career and identity experiences. Change initiatives that seek to tackle resistance need also to address discourses of nostalgia in the medical profession.

Originality/value – The main contribution of this study is that we illustrate how supposedly neutral discourses of nostalgia may sometimes be mobilised as devices of resistance. This study questions simplistic focus on numerical representation, such as feminisation, as indicative of modernisation and highlights the significance of exploring discourses and head counts for understanding resistance to modernisation.

Previous research has found that people collectively wronged by an outgroup take insult when its representative offers compensation, and that an expression of shame but not guilt can lower such insult. This experiment showed a moderating factor: strength of outgroup blame. Black community members were participants, presented with an apology for discriminatory searches of Blacks by the police. The effects -that shame but not guilt reduces insult from compensation -were replicated only among those who strongly blamed outgroup entities. As before, these effects emerged only on insult rather than satisfaction measures, and only when compensation was offered. When blamed by the public, an official body should therefore consider how much its apology conveys shame rather than guilt.

Please provide an overview of initiatives in developing countries which seek to provide targeted recruitment, professional development and retention for indigenous or ethnic minority employees. Please focus on public sector agencies/positions that are responsible for managing public policy advice and government programmes.

This paper focus is on how Management and Leadership affects senior employees in the modern public sector. Thereby evaluating questions such as what is the modern public sector and its goals? what is the role of senior employee's in achieving these goals and how does it correlate with their management and leadership functions and characteristics?
This write-up does not aim to exert the dominance or adoption of either Management or Leadership to senior employees in the modern public sector. However, the focus would be on examining the distinctiveness of the two phenomena in the modern public sector (NPM) and the role of senior employees

This pilot study seeks to explore the effects of different economic conditions on the public service motivation (PSM) levels of a small group of government and private sector employees in Malaysia, a developing country in East Asia. It address three questions: (1) Are the PSM levels of government employees significantly higher than those of private sector employees?; (2) Are the PSM levels of employees significantly influenced by their perceptions of the external economic environment?; and (3) Is the relationship between the economy and PSM affected by the sector of employment? It applies vignettes that present different hypothetical economic conditions, and explores the impact on PSM. The government respondents’ PSM levels are found to be higher than those of private sector respondents, and appear to be sensitive to perceptions of different economic conditions.

This study is an assessment that is based on a research study completed by Rebecca E. Short titled “A Content Analysis of State Employee Handbooks” (Southwest Texas State Applied Research Project, 1997). Like the Short (1997) study, there are three purposes to this research. The first purpose is to survey the available literature and establish an “ideal type” for the information that should be contained in an employee handbook. The second purpose is to assess both quantitatively and qualitatively the information contained in a sample of Texas state agency employee handbooks. Third, is to make recommendations on how to improve state agency employee handbook.

Working for public organizations has many rewards most of those rewards are not always direct but internal and can either be pride of a sense of self-worth by helping others. However working in the public sector, managers often have problems getting their workers to be more productive and also remember who they are there to serve. Many business organizations use employee of the month programs to increase worker productivity. Of these methods many programs of employee recognition have been tried such as manager or coworker recognition programs. Employee recognition programs have their merits but are mostly internal affairs. The basis of this research if to investigate whether a citizen based employee recognition program could be used to increase worker productivity and in turn increase city productivity as a whole for local government.

Purpose -Attempts to modernise the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK involve promoting flexible approaches to work and training, restructuring postgraduate training and increasing control and scrutiny of doctors' work. However, the medical community has responded with expressed anxiety about the implications of these changes for medical professionalism and the quality of patient care. This paper aims to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach -Drawing on literature on nostalgia, gender, identity and organisations, the paper explores the narratives of 20 senior NHS hospital doctors to identify ways in which doctors use nostalgia to react to organisational and professional challenges and resist modernisation and feminisation of medicine. Findings -This paper illustrates how senior hospital doctors' nostalgic discourses of temporal commitment may be used to constitute a highly esteemed professional identity, creating a sense of personal and occupational uniqueness for senior hospital doctors, intertwined with gendered forms of othering and exclusionary practices. Practical implications -Nostalgia at first sight appears to be an innocuous social construct. However, this study illustrates the significance of nostalgia as a subversive practice of resistance with implications for women's career and identity experiences. Change initiatives that seek to tackle resistance need also to address discourses of nostalgia in the medical profession. Originality/value -The main contribution of this study is that we illustrate how supposedly neutral discourses of nostalgia may sometimes be mobilised as devices of resistance. This study questions simplistic focus on numerical representation, such as feminisation, as indicative of modernisation and highlights the significance of exploring discourses and head counts for understanding resistance to modernisation.

Why do government employees work long hours, and what are the consequences? Although there is generally littles scope for extra pay in return for extra hours in the Australian Public Service (APS), a significant proportion of its employees work long hours. This study draws from the organizational citizenship behaviour literature in an attempt to understand why APS employees work extra hours. It uses the 2015 APS Employee Census to examine the APS employees' patterns of working hours, and the links between working extra hours and three outcomes: job performance, personal wellbeing, and intention to leave one's agency. Several organizational factors are found to be positively associated with working extra hours. Many who work extra hours also believe that their job performance is high, but they report poor wellbeing and are thinking of leaving their agency.
DOI: 10.1177/0734371X16658335

"http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000013  Previous research has found that people collectively wronged by an outgroup take insult when its representative offers compensation, and that an expression of shame but not guilt can lower such insult. This experiment showed a moderating factor: strength of outgroup blame. Black community members were participants, presented with an apology for discriminatory searches of Blacks by the police. The effects – that shame but not guilt reduces insult from compensation – were replicated only among those who strongly blamed outgroup entities. As before, these effects emerged only on insult rather than satisfaction measures, and only when compensation was offered. When blamed by the public, an official body should therefore consider how much its apology conveys shame rather than guilt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)"

Governments are Canada’s largest employers. Federal, provincial and municipal administrations together employ 3.6 million people. In some provinces and territories, the public sector employs more than 25% of the total labour force.
Employment in government is highly desirable among job seekers, including immigrants. However, immigrants are about half as less likely than their Canadian-born peers to get into public administration. In 2006, 6.5% of Canadian-born workers were employed in public administration compared to just 3.3% of immigrants.
Why is this the case? And best practices from governments that are paying attention to this issue.

During the last decade, senior civil service (henceforth, SCS) systems have been reformed in many countries, while in the East and Central Europe countries they have been established anew. These changes have affected not only the elements of executive corps system and its governance but also have formed new identities (official, personal, or social) and relationship with politicians. The ideas of SCS establishment have reached Lithuania as well. Primary ideas of 2011 about the distinction of senior executives in the system and their managerial empowerment changed later on and developed into the idea of establishing a separate SCS corps. In 2013-2014, an active development of SCS reform in Lithuania was taking place. It should be noted that often ambitious ideas about the reform are accompanied not only by public discussions and criticism but also experience a political and administrative resistance. Partly, this is a tendency preconditioned by a natural aim for continuity and preservation of the status quo of institutional interests in the state institutions' framework 1 . On the other hand, some ideological-political, executive resistance, and contextual factors were involved in establishing the SCS and for further reforms, which would often become an insurmountable obstacle. 2 It is important to analyse the incentives and obstacles of this reform development in analyzing the establishment of Lithuanian SCS by two aspects: effectiveness of the reform development (to what extent primary ideas are implemented) and the attitude of executives towards the system being established. The attitudes of top executives, as a part of possible SCS actors, can influence the agenda of the Government related to the system establishment. A conceptual basis for the research is the analysis of factors of public sector, first, related to the distinction of political-administrative causality factors/powers and the analysis of their effect reform initiation and development. 3 These factors are complemented by the analysis of contextual factors of the reforms. This allows combining political-administrative and socioeconomic and society influences on reforms into a unity. This approach allows analyzing the 1 Bourgault J., Van Dorpe K., "Managerial reforms, Public Service Bargains and top civil servant identity",

In the era of globalization, reliable human resources are required to compete with human resources from other countries. If they cannot compete, reason, various efforts must be conducted. needs for professional human resources for engineers are and competency. With the issuance the professional engineer program can be established in the program can be established in universities which have fulfilled the requirements. establish an engineering profession program. and the aspects of improvement are necessary. approach. Data were collected by using documentation, observation, Delphi method, comparative studies. analysed by using descriptive statistics and non elasticity analysis, cohort analysis, data for decision making UniversitasNegeri Semarang in 2019 was not not been able to meet the existing requirements, program in mid-2020. and colleges for more realization. The Development and Development in infrastructure has an contributes 10.53% of GDP, the industrial sector contributes 17.63%, and the real estate sector 2.74%

Significant changes in employee demographics and values and the nature of public service employment have impacted personnel administration. This study evaluates the impact of both gender and race on the assessment of current HRM practices and reforms at the local level of government. Results from a national survey are assessed in order to enhance the field’s understanding of whether differences in administrative perceptions and values attributed to these two factors have the potential to translate in HR policy positions that continue to embrace or strive to transcend traditional public personnel management. We find that although certain functions and activities are seen as more important by specific groups in the study, the order of importance of these functions and activities is very similar between groups.

ii. Las PoLíticas de género en Los MuniciPios esPañoLes: eVo-Lución e instruMentos PrinciPaLes.-iii. Marco teórico.-iV. Método.-V. resuLtados: 1. Representación femenina en los municipios. 2. Dimensión estructural del área de mujer/igualdad de género en los municipios. 3. Planes de igualdad.-Vi. concLusiones.-Vii. BiBLiograFía. ISSN: 0048-7694, Núm. 158, Madrid, octubre-diciembre (2012), págs. 139-163 ESTRUCTURA, RECURSOS Y DESARROLLO DE LAS POLÍTICAS … P. OTERO HERMIDA Y R. BOUZAS LORENZO ABSTRACT

White-collar 'office work' is often thought to be more skilled because more abstract.. While skilled labour in classical liberal philosophy was associated with conscious, instrumental technique, in opposition to 'unconscious' caring or affective behaviour, new theoretical currents have revealed the gendered nature and alienation of practice from experience in such models. In this paper I show the ways in which meanings of skill in white-collar occupations are determined by class relationships to middle managers, gendered norms, and a diffuse 'general intellect' by looking at the responses of Jennifer, a secretary at Simon Fraser University's Facilities Services department. Besides manual “blue-collar” labour, Jennifer's workplace requires large amount of paperwork, computing power, and service work, which proves to be a far more experiential, embodied, and material than the term “white collar” would seem to suggest.

Using the training needs projection methods in the Spectrum Policy Modeling System software module ProTrain™, JHPIEGO collaborated with the Malawi Ministry of Health and Population (MOHP) Reproductive Health Unit (RHU) to estimate numbers of Family Planning/Reproductive Health (FP/RH) service providers who are needed to reach total fertility rate (TFR) and contraceptive prevalence goals for Malawi from 2001–2007.

ProTrain™ allows the user to project the available versus required number of trained and competent family planning (FP) service providers of several FP methods, in various sectors of a national health system, given expected client demand and expected training outputs.

In creating these FP human resource projections, JHPIEGO was building upon work done at the FP/RH Projections Update Workshop in Malawi in March 2003 by the Malawi MOHP Reproductive Health Unit. Those demographic and FP projections form the foundation for the current human resources (HR) study. A conservative demography/family planning model was used, which assumed that the decline in TFR between 2001 and 2015 would be at the same rate as the decline measured between the two Malawi Demographic and Health Surveys (DHSs) in 1992 and 2000. This is a slower rate of decline, reaching 5.64 by the year 2015 instead of the population policy goal of 4.5 by 2015. The demography/family planning model was based on constrained rather than adequate resources to meet the TFR goal. The FP
projection contains estimates of current and anticipated future percentages of eligible women receiving their contraceptive services from different sources within Malawi: public and private sector, Christian Health Association of Malawi (CHAM), Banja La Mtsogolo (a local nongovernmental organization), and community-based distribution agents (CBDAs).

In order to construct the training projection model, JHPIEGO gathered data on several aspects of the preservice and inservice training that produces FP providers, and on FP service delivery in Malawi, from various data sources. The data sources included national human resource and training plans, and interviews with personnel at the Malawi MOHP Human Resources Management and Development (HRMD) and Planning Unit offices, the MOHP Reproductive Health Unit, the Nurses and Midwives Council of Malawi, and at several of the preservice institutions.

Results showed that current FP/RH training outputs would result in adequate to surplus numbers of injectables providers. However, there would not be sufficient providers of Norplant® implants and female sterilization in Malawi over the period 2001–2007. Introducing additional preservice training alone would bring the numbers of female sterilization providers up to meet the projected needs, but additional preservice education and inservice training would be needed to produce sufficient Norplant providers. The demand for condoms and pills will also surpass the
number of providers of these methods in the projection period from 2001 to 2007, although introducing more training was not modeled in the current set of projections.

Most supervisors dread employee discipline and often employ strategies not officially sanctioned by the organization. Poorly designed discipline systems cause this variation in discipline practices. Inconsistent discipline can cause losses in productivity and reduce employee morale. Extant literature offers little in the form of guidance for improving this important human resource activity. This article explore where normative literature on organizational culture may have explanatory value for understanding variation in discipline practices. The article suggests two groups of factors that have causal effects on discipline practices. The tangible factors are those describing the formal practices the organization wishes its employees to follow. The intangible factors provide cues for explaining why informal strategies emerge as successful practices for getting things done. Using this conception of organization culture, the article proposes hypotheses for future testing to validate the suspected influence of culture on decisions regarding employee discipline.

En el presente trabajo abordaremos un aspecto central en la implementación de las medidas para mejorar la efectividad y eficiencia del sector público, principalmente en el marco de medidas adoptadas por el Estado chileno a partir del año 1990 (que marca el regreso de la Democracia) hasta nuestros días. Nos referimos específicamente a la gestión del desempeño. Para comprender lo ocurrido en el Estado chileno durante este periodo de tiempo, debemos considerar que en: Frente al ajuste estructural, los países latinoamericanos sufrieron una serie de problemas y necesidades que el nuevo modelo de estado reducido no logró resolver, como por ejemplo la consolidación de la democracia, o la necesidad de alcanzar un cierto crecimiento económico dirigido a reducir brechas con los países desarrollados y la búsqueda de una mayor equidad en los propios países (Araya y Cerpa, 2008 citando a CLAD 1998). De esta manera, en el caso chileno se transita por la senda de la flexibilidad y el mérito como principios rectores de las reformas en la gestión pública. Ambos valores ejercen una suerte de contrapeso en la balanza del empleo público. A mayor mérito, mayor grado de profesionalización, estabilidad laboral y autonomía con respecto a la esfera política. A mayor flexibilidad, mayor dinamismo, adaptabilidad a los cambios del entorno y apertura a los asuntos ciudadanos. Ambos conceptos (flexibilidad y mérito) se consignan en los objetivos perseguidos por el ejecutivo y los legisladores con algunos hitos destacables en el año 1998 en el gobierno de Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle y en el año 2004 con el gobierno de Ricardo Lagos. El primer caso estuvo marcado por el sello de la "Gestión del Desempeño" a través de la creación de instrumentos de evaluación basados en indicadores de calidad, el segundo caso estuvo marcado por la profesionalización y creación de perfiles asociados a competencias de los altos directivos públicos. Como señala Morales