State and local GOVT - Assignment Example

and Local Government al Affiliation and Local Government In the Discussion Forum and Local Governments file), comment on the following: "The greatest professional challenges for public merit personnel are at the local level."  Then, on separate days, comment on two other threads.The public personnel administration theory in the U.S. has undergone various changes in orientation over time. For instance, early in the history of U.S., the membership of a person to a particular class played a major role in terms of obtaining and retaining federal employment.

However, this has changed overtime and today it has reached a time when issues of employment and retention of federal jobs are solely placed on merit. Public merit personnel system has become important in terms or ensuring that federal employment is given to the qualified individuals. However, it has been stated, “the greatest professional challenges for public merit personnel are at the local level.The merit principle entails the selection and appointment of the best person for any given job (Bowman & West, 2006).

This is the first instance where the challenge comes because public appointments have leaned towards professionalism, even at the local level. Professionals link professionalism to possession of knowledge and are attached to group identity. When applying issues of merit for a job at a local level more issues other than professionalism such as gender and race balance issues are considered to get the best individual for the job and this is a challenge. In looking at pay for performance systems, which is a type of public merit personnel system, both Perry et.al (2009) and Bowman (2010) found out that public merit personnel systems at the local level have many challenges that are caused by issues that include lack of adequate funding, inability to distinguish levels of performance, lack of employee confidence in merit systems, employee-manager distrust and bureaucratic resistance to merit systems among others (Bowman, 2009: Perry, Engbers & Jun, 2009).

These issues show that the above statement is true.Discuss the implications for state and local governments of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1997 (Revised). http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-authorities/intergovernment-personnel-act/#url=Provisions. What issues were addressed and why do you think they were included in the Act.The Revised Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) mobility program regulations came into effect from May 29, 1997 allowing federal agencies to operate efficiently and productively.

The regulations have several implications for state and local governments. First, the regulations ensures that state and local governments are able to deal with the challenge of sharing personnel in positions that have been difficult to fill because of the unavailability of qualified personnel. For instance, filling the positions of nurses and information technology experts has been difficult. The causes of this has been partly because of few professionals in these areas while another reason has been the fact that the professionals go to organizations that pay them better and provide better working environments.

These regulations, therefore, help to ensure that the employees can be temporarily mobile from non-federal agencies to state and local governments and vice-versa without losing their employment rights or benefits. This ensures that such employees can improve service in whatever area or place they serve and ultimately improve the performance of an agency.The issues that were addressed in the Act include giving agencies the opportunity to certify the eligibility of other organizations to participate in the mobility program and the fact that agencies will no longer be required to submit the assignment agreements to the office of the Personnel management (Farazmand, 2007).

These issues were included in the Act because they are important in terms of ensuring efficiency and productivity both in federal and non-federal agencies in state and local governments are highly maintained. Previously a lot of time was wasted because these responsibilities solely belonged to the office of Personnel Management. This means that it took time to process the mobility requests and assignments. This process was inefficient and reduced productivity. However, the Act made it easy to process the above issues, remove third party issues, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency through timesaving.

ReferencesBowman, J. S. (2009). The success of failure: the paradox of performance pay. Review of Public Personnel Administration.Bowman, J. S., & West, J. P. (2006). American public service: Radical reform and the merit system. CRC Press.Farazmand, A. (2007). Strategic public personnel administration: Building and managing human capital for the 21st century. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers.Office of Personnel Management. (n.d.). Intergovernment Personnel Act. Retrieved from http://www.opm.

gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-authorities/intergovernment-personnel-act/#url=ProvisionsPerry, J. L., Engbers, T. A., & Jun, S. Y. (2009). Back to the Future? Performance‐Related Pay, Empirical Research and the Perils of Persistence. Public Administration Review, 69(1), 39-51.