At-Will Employment in the States

• Date: 01 September 2014
• Author: J. Edward Kellough,Jungin Kim
• Published date: 01 September 2014
• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X13484154
• Subject Matter: Articles

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2014, Vol. 34(3) 218 –236

© The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X13484154

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Article

At-Will Employment in

the States: Examining the

Perceptions of Agency

Personnel Directors

Jungin Kim1 and J. Edward Kellough2

Abstract

This study examines data from a 2010 survey of state agency human resource directors

in six states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, and South Carolina. The

survey was designed to obtain data on the impressions these managers have of the

impact of at-will employment in civil service systems. Findings reveal that the managers’

attitudes are mixed, but they are more likely to register agreement with positive

assessments of at-will employment than negative assessments. Managers who think

that employees can trust their organizations to treat them fairly are more likely than

others to express positive views and are somewhat less likely to agree with negative

statements. Personnel managers who believe that at-will employment is sometimes

used to expand the reach of political patronage are much more likely than others to

agree with negative statements characterizing the reform. The respondents’ sex, race/

ethnicity, political ideology, private sector experience, and years of experience in the

public sector exhibit little apparent impact on attitudes toward at-will employment.

Keywords

at-will employment, civil service reform, new public management, human resources

management

In the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, efforts to implement civil service reforms

intensified as a result, in part, of such forces as the reinventing government and new

public management movements. Significant changes to civil service rules and

1University of Suwon, Hwaseong-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea

2University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jungin Kim, University of Suwon, 17, Wauan-gil, Bongdam-eup, Hwaseong-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of

Korea.

Email: jungink@gmail.com

484154ROP34310.1177/0734371X13484154Review of Public Personnel AdministrationKim and Kellough

research-article2013

Kim and Kellough 219

procedures occurred in many jurisdictions, including the U.S. states (Kellough &

Nigro, 2006; Kellough & Selden, 2003). Reforms in the states produced such out-

comes as more decentralized personnel systems (Coggburn, 2005), increased at-will

employment and eroded merit protections (Hays & Sowa, 2006), and the implementa-

tion of pay-for-performance systems (Kellough & Nigro, 2002). Indeed, the widely

discussed 1996 reforms in the state of Georgia embodied all of these changes (Kellough

& Nigro, 2002; Kuykendall & Facer, 2002; Nigro & Kellough, 2000).

Proponents of state civil service reforms argued that restructuring would improve

the efficiency of government service production and delivery, and would, as a result,

make government more like business.1 However, questions of whether those goals for

reform have been achieved, and whether they should be our primary focus, remain

open. Reforms at the state level, for example, have emphasized political control, man-

agement flexibility, and to a considerable extent the prioritization of efficiency over

equity (Kellough & Nigro, 2006). The decentralization of personnel management

authority and the reduction of employee rights and protections have been important

themes. But, this orientation toward efficiency and perceived businesslike goals must

be considered in the context of competing governmental values, such as accountability

and procedural fairness (Kellough, 1998). Moreover, legal constraints grounded in

Constitutional restrictions on the exercise of governmental authority may further

inhibit the effectiveness of reforms modeled from business practices.

Human resource (HR) directors of the various departments and agencies of state

government are at the frontlines of efforts to implement reforms in the states. These

managers are well positioned to judge the impacts of major aspects of civil service

reforms, since their careers focus on the implementation of personnel policy (see

Coggburn, 2006). The present study examines the attitudes of state agency HR direc-

tors toward the implementation and expansion of at-will employment, one of the most

dramatic of recent reforms. We build on and extend earlier work by scholars such as

Battaglio (2010), Battaglio and Condrey (2009), Bowman and West (2006), Coggburn

(2006), Coggburn et al. (2010), and Goodman and Mann (2010). As is widely under-

stood, at-will employment removes significant pretermination rights from public

employees. Our analysis focuses on two basic questions: (a) What is the assessment of

at-will employment by state agency HR directors, and (b) What factors are associated

with variation in those assessments. We next review existing literature on at-will

employment and discuss our data and methods. Our findings are then presented, and

we conclude with a discussion of implications of our results.

State Reforms and At-Will Employment:

A Look at the Literature

Under the doctrine of at-will employment, the employer and the employee both enter

the employment relationship voluntarily and either may terminate that relationship at

any time for any reason, provided the reason is not proscribed by law (Battaglio, 2010;

Coggburn, 2006, 2007; Kellough & Nigro, 2006). As a practical matter, this means

that an employer is free to terminate a worker for any cause as long as it is not done on