12 HR management
The HR Management indicator is defined as: the meritocracy of recruitment and extent to which civil servants are effectively attracted, managed and developed. “The public sector is very labour intensive – around 70 per cent of the budgets of most public organisations are spent on staff” (Boviard & Löffler, 2003), so good HR management is key to the successful functioning of an exemplary civil service. Performance management can help create incentives for personal development in the civil service. Fukuyama (2013) recognises that recruitment and reward “remain at the core of any measure of quality of governance. Whether bureaucrats are recruited and promoted on the basis of merit”. Meanwhile, Boviard & Löffler (2003) note that “if the HR policies are not right, then public organisations will not attract the human resources they need to perform the functions of government and deliver the services that government has promised the electorate”.
The HR management indicator is comprised of nine metrics, an increase of four from the 2017 Pilot. The data sources for the indicator are:
- Quality of Government expert survey by the University of Gothenburg (QoG) [2015].
- OECD survey on Strategic HumanResources Management (OECD) [2016].
| Metric | Source | Type | Public sector proxy | Data transformation | Weighting within indicator | Definition of the source metric (e.g. question wording) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In theme (A) | Theme (B) | Total (C=A*B) | ||||||
| Meritocratic recruitment | ||||||||
| Skill and merit appointment | QoG | Expert assessment | Yes | None | 25.0% | 50.0% | 12.5% | When recruiting public sector employees, the skills and merits of the applicants decide who gets the job? [1=hardly ever, 7=almost always; mean score] |
| Political connections | QoG | Expert assessment | Yes | Inverted | 25.0% | 50.0% | 12.5% | When recruiting public sector employees, the political connections of the applicants decide who gets the job? [Rated 1-7; mean score] |
| Personal connections | QoG | Expert assessment | Yes | Inverted | 25.0% | 50.0% | 12.5% | When recruiting public sector employees, the personal connections of the applicants (for example kinship or friendship) decide who gets the job? [Rated 1-7; mean score] |
| Formal assessment | QoG | Expert assessment | Yes | None | 25.0% | 50.0% | 12.5% | Public sector employees are hired via a formal examination system? [Rated 1-7; mean score] |
| Attracting and retaining talent | ||||||||
| Comparable salaries | QoG | Expert assessment | Yes | None | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Senior officials have salaries that are comparable with the salaries of private sector managers with roughly similar training and responsibilities? [Rated 1-7; mean score] |
| Performance-related pay [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | None | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Index of the use of performance-related pay [Index ranging from 0 to 1] |
| HR practices | ||||||||
| Performance assessment [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | None | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Index of the use of performance assessment in HR decisions [Index ranging from 0 to 1] |
| Separate HRM practices for SCS [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | None | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Index of whether distinct HR practices are used for senior civil servants [Index ranging from 0 to 1] |
| Data-driven HRM | ||||||||
| Use of databases in HR [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | None | 100.0% | 10.0% | 10.0% | Index of the use of databases for HR management [Index ranging from 0 to 1] |
| Tables 3.10.A & 3.10.B in the original 2019 publication | ||||||||
12.1 Imputation of missing data
None of the 38 countries selected for the 2019 edition of InCiSE have completely missing data for the HR management metrics. As a result the imputation of missing data for the HR management metrics is based solely on the data within the indicator.
12.2 Changes from the 2017 Pilot
In the 2017 Pilot, InCiSE used five metrics from the Quality of Governance study. These provided only partial coverage of the topic area, with a particularly strong focus on meritocratic recruitment. Since the 2017 Pilot, the OECD published the 2017 edition of their Government at a Glance report, including a number of measures from their 2016 Survey on Strategic Human Resource Management. The 2019 edition of InCiSE has incorporated three metrics from this survey as published in Government at a Glance in order to improve the coverage of the indicator.
While there continue to be arguments about the use and implementation of performance appraisal and performance-related pay mechanisms within public sector organisations, the OECD (2005) suggests that even if there is no direct performance improvement associated with these measures they can act as a catalyst for change. Thus, there may be secondary effects from performance appraisal and performance related pay that improve civil service effectiveness.