(sample, fictional literature review)
Josephine Student
B. Merit Systems and Position Analysis
Mouse, Matilda, “Women in the US Civil Service: Career Advancement Patterns, 2000-2010,” American Review of Personnel Administration, vol. 30 (Sep. 2013), pp. 213-239.
Peters, Gus, and Peters, Peter, "Civil Service Reform: The Impact of P.L. 111-480," Public Personnel Administration Review, vol. 72 (September 2012), pp. 84-96.
Park, Kim Sun, “Using Essay Questions as a Component of Civil Service Examinations,” Journal of Public Personnel Administration, vol. 29 (Fall 2011), pp. 407-420.
The three articles selected for this review all have to do with the US federal civil service system. They represent recent analyses of the Civil Service, focusing on different facets of it. Together, they address the issues of: whether the merit system has an inherent “glass ceiling” for female employees, whether some of the revisions imposed by recent legislation have had the desired effects, and whether the “multiple choice” format of most exams yields the most useful measure of an applicant’s ability to be successful in a position.
In her article, Mouse (2013) delves deeply into the information contained in a federal Civil Service database, the “Annual Report of Personnel in the Federal Civil Service.” This is a collection of data reported by each agency in the federal government that has at least 100 employees covered by the federal merit system.
Using the data set, Mouse demonstrates that the career advancement patterns of male and female merit employees were significantly different during the time period studied. In short, she found that female employees were less likely to move a step up on the General Schedule (GS) classification than male employees, and that those women who did move up were less likely than men to have moved up more than one grade during the time period.
Mouseanalyzes several different variables and whether they explain the apparent differential success in career advancement between male and female employees. One variable she studies is prior length of service in the federal merit system. [Blah, blah, blah…
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She found that the most powerful explanation of the career advancement differential was whether an employee had taken a break in employment for family leave reasons. Though any employee is eligible to voluntarily step back from his/her job for family leave reasons, about four times as many female employees did that during the period than did males. As reported in the data set, much of the differential was explained by an employee herself giving birth to a child. (Though not assigned for this week’s class, our textbook discusses family leave in Chapter 11. It does not, however, discuss the potential implications of exercising one’s family leave rights.) Mouse closes her article with a call for further political debate about the impact of exercising one’s right to a family leave on one’s prospects for career advancement.
Though not specifically addressing the family leave issue, the Peters and Peters article (2012) examined some recent legislative revisions to the civil service practices, and whether the resulting impact of those changes has been favorable or unfavorable. They reviewed Public Law 111-480, “The Increasing Efficiency of Government Hiring Practices Act of 2010,” first explaining its provisions before turning to an analysis of its impact.
The IEGHP Act was pushed for by members of Congress who intended to revise existing law and procedures in order to give federal agency and division supervisors more discretion in transferring employees within the agency or division. The Act requires that the employee’s new position be at least at the same GS level as his or her previous position. It stipulates that the employee shall have the right to refuse the first transfer offered, but that he or she must accept the next transfer offered.[Blah, blah, blah…
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The Peters professors based their study on a survey administered to employees in seven different federal agencies, in an attempt to measure employee attitudes about and experiences with the new transfer practices. Seventy four percent of employee respondents reported feeling that at least some of the transfers that they had witnessed were not for performance reasons, but for some other reason, such as retaliation or personality conflicts.[Blah, blah, blah…
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Peters and Peters concluded that, according to responding employees in these seven agencies, the IEGHP Act has been implemented in a way that has led to decreased morale and less interest in continuing in a civil service career in retirement. If that is indeed the case, it would appear to undermine the concept of “public service motivation,” as discussed in Chapter 5 of our text. By making the employee’s continued employment less certain, it may be causing the employee to devote and dedicate less of himself or herself to the work of the organization, thereby actually decreasing the efficiency the Act was intended to improve.
Kim Sun Park (2011) explores another possible way to improve the operation of the federal merit system: by revising the format of the civil service examinations. He developed, tested, and administered two faux “civil service exams” to a sample of 400 undergraduate students at a midsize, Midwestern public university. One of these was a standard multiple-choice general knowledge exam, and the other was an exam combining short-answer and essay questions. The former were graded by computer, and the latter were graded by a panel of university faculty.
One finding was that the multiple-choice exam scores were significantly lower than those received by the students doing the essay exams. This was the opposite of what Park had hypothesized. This caused him to wonder if the faculty graders of the essay exams were really as rigorous as they should be. To explore that question further, he utilized a different sample of 400 students from the same university, and administered to each of them and exam consisting of half multiple-choice and half essay questions. Statistical analysis showed that there was a significant difference between the scores of the exams taken: 89% of the students in the second study received higher scores on the essay component than they received on the multiple-choice component. That still didn’t answer the question of whether the essay graders were too easy, or whether the students actually knew more than was disclosed by multiple-choice questions, and were able to demonstrate that on the essay questions.
The final step take by Park was to run a correlation analysis between students’ multiple-choice and essay exam scores. There was a .78 correlation between the two, which meant that most of the students who scored at the top of the scale on the multiple-choice exam were also scoring at the top of the scale on the essay exam. This correlation was also true for those scoring at the bottom of the scales. Park concluded thateither a multiple-choice exam or an essay exam could differentiate between the higher- and lower-performing students (and therefore, likely higher-and lower-performing future employees). That being the case, he suggests a continued reliance on multiple-choice exams. The efficiency of administration and grading of multiple-choice exams outweighs that of essay exams, and the overall value is comparable.
Taken together, these articles give us some insight into the federal civil service and its operation. Mouse tells us that the system is not yet free from a “glass ceiling” with regard to female employees, but she suggests that that is it is probably not due to institutionalized discrimination or other civil service administrative procedures. Rather, this effect is likely due more to socialization of individuals regarding roles and values, as well as decisions of individual employees. The Peters and Peters article should serve as a caution to those who would revise the existing civil service system in order to wring more efficiency out of it: such efforts may have unintended, and indeed, contravening consequences. Park’s study echoes in some ways the conclusion of Peters and Peters. Revising the format of the examination may also not be a desirable way to improve the civil service process. In fact, it may make the process even longer, more cumbersome, and more subject to subjectivity.