Get Your Shades Now—The Future's Still Bright: Leveraging Human Resources for Tomorrow's Public Service

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13066
• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Author: R. Paul Battaglio,Jeremy L. Hall

Editorial

Get Your Shades Now—The Future’s Still Bright: Leveraging Human Resources for Tomorrow’s Public Service 301

For the past 10 years, public human resource

management has evolved from a focus on

hard skills for public service (e.g., education,

professional training) to a greater interest in soft

skills—those that are more interpersonal in nature.

Indeed, a recent report from The Volcker Alliance,

entitled “Preparing Tomorrow’s Public Service,” places

a premium on interpersonal skills and competencies

associated with developing such a skill set (Volcker

Alliance 2018). Drawing from a survey using a diverse

group of regional, governmental, and educational

levels across the United States, the data show the

importance of soft skills such as commitment

(75 percent of survey respondents expect to stay

in government for the long term) and motivation

(71 percent believe they are making good progress

in fulfilling their professional aspirations) in the

development of future public service leaders

(p. 14). Survey respondents further emphasized the

importance of the role that such soft skills play in

creating high-performance government.

Ever mindful of the future, PAR is committed to

a better understanding of these soft skills and the

role scholarship can play in advancing evidence-

based practice. The articles in this issue were chosen

specifically for this reason as they amalgamate the

themes of the Volcker Report with broader public

administration scholarship. Advancing dialogue on

human resource development for a future generation

of public servants will entail: (1) empowering public

servants to achieve a meaningful contribution; (2)

appreciating the role behavioral science can play

in eliciting meaning; (3) developing a common

lexicon of evidence-based research practices; and

(4) understanding the role diversity plays in a

demographically changing world.

Meaningful Public Service

One of the biggest takeaways from the Volcker

Alliance report was the important role that soft

skills—interpersonal effectiveness and personal

resilience—play in building the public service of

tomorrow (p. 14). Empowering employees and

emphasizing collaboration will increasingly determine

the extent to which meaning can be found from

one’s contribution to the greater good. Hameduddin

and Fernandez (2019) demonstrate that supportive

managerial practices aimed at getting employees to

become more engaged with their work—such as

listening to employees, treating them with respect,

communicating expectations, and promoting growth

and development—can lead to higher performance.

Likewise, Hassan, Park, and Raadschelders (2019)

show that an empowering leadership style is a

motivational tool for improving proficiency and

conscientiousness among police officers, thus

positively affecting work units in public organizations.

Public employees with high levels of public service

motivation and civic engagement are also more

likely to perform environmentally friendly behaviors

in both workplace and nonworkplace settings, a

positive spillover from a soft skill approach (Azhar

and Yang 2019). Expanding the call to public service

to include international organizations, Giauque and

Varone (2019) show that commitment within these

institutions is predicated upon altruistic, social, and

extrinsic work opportunities.

Leveraging Meaning through Behavioral

Science

How we act on the insight gleaned from soft skill

development also matters. Appreciating the role

behavioral science can play in eliciting meaning may

also prove to be a fruitful endeavor. In this issue,

Battaglio Jr. et al. (2019) provide a comprehensive

overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and

scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to

tackle public administration, management, and

policy issues. This stream of research illustrates how

cognitive biases systematically affect public policy and

management decisions. Recent work in behavioral

science illuminates the gap between how people

should behave and how they actually behave, thus

moving beyond traditional models of full rationality

in decision making. Leveraging behavioral science

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

R. Paul Battaglio

University of Texas at Dallas

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 3, pp. 301–303. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13066.

Get Your Shades Now—The Future’s Still Bright: Leveraging

Human Resources for Tomorrow’s Public Service