Still not Developing after all these Years? The Intra-Organizational Role of Public Personnel Departments

According to prominent but dated research, public personnel departments do not effectively serve the needs of intraorganizational stakeholders, such as management, supervisors, and employees. Researchers have found that stakeholders, facing high public demands for service but constrained by limited revenues, want help from their personnel departments to improve performance. Personnel departments, however, remain too entrenched in their traditional oversight role to respond to these demands effectively. However, such research is quite dated-it was conducted more than ten years ago, and more recent research in the private sector and methodological considerations suggest that those findings may no longer be, if they ever were, accurate. Meanwhile, revenue constraints and service demands have intensified, and public service employment is undergoing fundamental changes, making the role of the personnel department in meeting stakeholder demands more critical. Relying on a quantitative analysis of 26 North Carolina county personnel departments, this paper finds that previous depictions of stakeholder demands may be inaccurate. Furthermore, it suggests that personnel departments are more responsive to those demands than has heretofore been found but that the stakeholders are not oriented to improving organizational performance.