DISTINGUISHING PUBLIC SECTOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FROM THAT OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR

1. DISTINGUSHING PUBLIC SECTOR HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGENT ACTIVITIES
FROM THOSE OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR.
Personnel management in the public sector is highly formalized and country specific
(especially to labour laws of a country). The legal policies, processes and the system needs to
be adhered to as per the country of origin. In most cases it is more structure specific with
hierarchies and more rigid systems in place.in contrary, human resource management in
business organisations or private sectors are highly influenced by the organization and their
country of operation. Diffusion of country specific practices is prevalent whether it is
ethnocentric, geocentric, regiocentric or polycentric. For instance, myriad practices are made
flexible to adapt with the location and its employees. One can note that public sector
personnel management is politically influenced while private sector human resource
management is apolitical, hence activities like employee selection, performance appraisal or
job analysis differ in both sectors since both sectors have different considerations to follow.
Moving on, a sound approach is adopted towards certain personnel management practices
like compensation and benefit, leave policies and recruitments are visible to both sectors. For
instance both the public and private sectors in Zimbabwe are regulated by the labour act on
issues of leave policies, and chapter 12b of the act which deals with retrenchments and
termination of employment contracts. Nonetheless, public personnel management is not
ultimately bound by such approaches like succession planning, performance appraisal and
talent management as in the private sector. Taking talent management as a case in point, the
private sector, source (finding talent), screening (sorting of qualified and unqualified
applicants), selection (assessment and testing ) and boarding it is not visible in the public
sector, but rather focus is vested on employee retention. For example, the private sector in
most cases sends outstanding employees to school for further education and training while
the public sector keep those with talent within the public sector, but at the end both ideas
enhance development and success. Although some of the above approaches are not orders of
the day by the public sector, the idea is only to motivate employees as in the private sector
though in different ways.
In addition, it is an undeniable fact that both sectors have mandated themselves to service and
goods provisions (Schweyer 1999). This can be exemplified by the fact that state owned
companies and local authorities provides services like water, residential stands, electricity

2. and basic commodities which are also being provided by private organizations. Nevertheless,
the difference is on considerations. The private sector considers the competitive advantage
before supplying while the private sector considers demand and economic stability before
supplying. For instance private companies search the number of suppliers of the same product
of service in an area while the private sector search for a number of individuals in need of
such a service. One can actually note that these considerations affects performance appraisal
in both sectors since they have different key result areas (KRA).
Indeed, both public and private sector personnel management are bound by values but the
difference in values differ. Schumpeter (2010) denoted that values are critical success factors
(CSF) thus they determine the success the failure or success of an organization. The public
sector has much value for good governance (equity, equality, transparency, accountability,
effectiveness and efficiency) hence these determine its success, for instance it reduce the
concept of market failure. In contrary, the private sector values the organizational culture and
has value for money since it is goal driven. Regardless of these differences, all the values are
critical in the success of each organization in its operation and are critical for job evaluation
during or after the course of operation.