Civil Service Reform in Georgia

In recent years there has been a growing interest m civil service reform designed to decentralize and deregulate the public personnel management process in an effort to overcome the perceived inflexibility, inefficiency, and lack of responsiveness of traditional civil service structures. In 1996, the state of Georgia enacted a comprehensive reform of its civil service system that in many ways went beyond the kinds of changes that had taken place in other states The state removed merit system protections from all employees hired after July 1, 1996 and placed authority for most personnel management decisions in line agencies and departments, leaving the state's central personnel agency to serve primarily as a consultant to those organizations rather than as a regulator of the system This article reports the findings of a statewide survey of supervisory and nonsupervisory employees working within the Georgia civil service The findings indicate that more than three years after initial implementation ofthe reform employees are quite pessimistic about the effects of the reform on personnel management processes in state agencies