The Policy Line towards Government Contract Personnel and Reality in Taiwan: A Perspective from Government Internal Labor Market*
Bennis Wai Yip So**
Abstract
This paper tries to examine the gaps between the policy line towards government contract personnel system and the reality in Taiwan, which refer to the gap between the normative position of the personnel authority and the reality at the implementation level as well as the gap between the strategic position derived from the western public human resource theory and the real situation in Taiwan.
This paper first compares and contrasts the global trend of public man-power flexibilization with the corresponding policy line in Taiwan, then ze-roing in on the policy line of the recent reform of government contract per-sonnel. Policy gaps are identified through an examination of official docu-ments and literature. The author proposes that the policy gaps have formed as a result of the relative positions of career civil servants and contract em-ployees. Existing literature projects an interesting phenomenon that grass-root career civil servants are highly mobile and their organizational com-mitment is relatively low, while the contract employees are ironically stable and more attached to organization. This phenomenon works against the oft-quoted human resource architecture developed by D. P. Lepak and S. A. Snell.
In response, this paper advances some government internal labor mar-ket (GILM) propositions to reframe the relative positions of career civil ser-vants and contract employees. The author argues that the above phenome-non, which is seldom found in other countries, is caused by the accessibility of career civil servants and the inaccessibility of contract employees to the GILM. The GILM should be a significant but underdeveloped issue of pub-lic personnel administration for Taiwan. Finally, this paper suggests that the government consider the GLIM as a variable in making the strategy of gov-ernment human resource management and reposition the manpower of career civil servants and contract employees.
Keywords: contract personnel, government internal labor market, organiza-tional commitment, public manpower system, career civil ser-vant
* The draft paper was presented in the 2011 TASPAA Annual Conference. This paper is derived from a research project sponsored by the National Science Council (NSC 97-2410-H-004-167-MY2).
** Associate Professor, Dept of Public Administration, National Chengchi University.
http://www.exam.gov.tw/public/Data/23120392571.pdf