Discussion Post: Statesman and Competency Approach

Competency vs. Theoretical Approaches: A Discussion
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Competency vs. Theoretical Approaches: A Discussion
The question of public administration is an open and enduring one. The effective management of a public administration is not simply a matter of concocted recipes of managerial processes. Instead, effective public administration is a question open to internal matters of competency and employee participation as well as external matters of accountability and effective public engagement. The story of public administration is as old as the administration is. Ultimately, public administrators, managing a group of city/municipality/county managers, aim for one goal: meeting public expectations using available funds. The efficacy of any given public administration makes it possible, however, for public administrators to request additional funding to develop new projects or, during crises, close budgetary deficits. To achieve success in public administration is, accordingly, a matter of effective management of resources, human and financial, in order to deliver on promises made to the public during elections, for supervising officials, or meeting internal organizational objectives and managing properly, for city/municipality/county managers. Conversely, ineffective elected officials and/or instated city/municipality/county managers are likely to draw public ire if public needs – and, for that matter, expectations – are not met. That is why efforts in conceptualization and practical application are constantly invested in improving internal administrative performance in order to achieve external public success.
Theoretical and competency approaches are often applied separately or in combination with public administration. The outcomes each approach offers show differential degrees of success. The choice, or preference, of one approach, is, moreover, a complex process and not just as straightforward as is commonly understood. Indeed, whilst a more abstract approach offers a more generalized way to public administration, a competency approach offers practical insights into improving the performance of city/municipality/county managers beyond classic job-based mandates. The question of internal management performed by city/municipality/county managers, under constant supervision of and feedback from elected officials and/or city administrators, has received special attention in the literature already. Favero, Meier, and O'Toole (2016), for instance, show effective internal management of the New York City school system over a 3-year span yields educational outcomes of consequence. Trust, employee participation, goal-setting, and providing feedback are show, moreover, to enable a more effective internal management of public organizations, a school system in the current case. Then again, conceptual vs. competency approaches in public administration have origins dating back as far as the 1980s (De Beeck & Hondeghem, 2010). Given the rapid pace of innovations, coupled with a constant need of private enterprises to continue to compete, competency management has become a de facto approach to private enterprises and, by the late 1990s, public administration officials also started to apply a competency-based approach (De Beeck & Hondeghem, p. 12). The general shift has been, accordingly, one from a job- to a competency-orie...