Comparative Public Administration
February 12, 2025
Public Relations experts ought to possess the following skills for a highly successful and rewarding career. Excellent Writing Skills A Public Relations expert needs to write well. He ought to be creative and should master the art of putting thoughts into meaningful words. Your words need to create the desired impact and influence the customers. […]
The structural functional approach to public administration is a term adapted from sociology and anthropology which interprets society as a structure with interrelated parts. This approach was developed by the celebrated anthropologist Malinowski and Radcliff Brown. So, according to them, a society has a structure and functions. These functions are norms, customs, traditions and institutions […]
Let us go through some workplace ethics: Rules and regulations ought to be same for everyone. Everyone needs to attend office on time irrespective of their designation, distance of their home from the workplace, salary or status. An individual cannot come to office late just because he is the team leader and his team is […]
Individuals have a tendency to think and question before performing. This is fruitful in analysis and forecasting of individual’s behaviour. Individual decision making has certain pros and cons, few of which are mentioned below: Pros of Individual Decision Making An individual generally makes prompt decisions. While a group is dominated by various people, making decision-making […]
Etiquette refers to good manners essential for individuals to earn respect and appreciation in the society. An individual who lacks etiquette is never taken seriously by fellow workers at work. Employer Etiquette Employer Etiquette refers to codes of conduct necessary for an employer to follow in order to set an example for employees. Employers must […]
We are at the next level of understanding departments within the organizations. In the earlier article we understood about the line staff and auxiliary agencies and the organization of business in departments based on the four principles of finance, process, clientele and geography. This article shall look at the distribution of authority within the department.
Based on the distribution of authority, there are two main systems namely Bureau System and the Board or Commission system within departments. When all the administrative authority is invested in a single individual within the department then the system is Bureau.
When a plural body is vested with all the administrative power then the system is known as Board or Commission. Now, the next obvious question that comes into the mind is how to decide which system to use. According to author Raj Kumar Pruthi, in his book Administrative Organizations, there are conditions that determine the choice of systems:
Also, when an organization has to perform both kinds of functions, then in such cases as well, the Board systems works better.
To sum up, for services and functions that require collective intelligence, holistic view points, mature decision making, a Board system works well as there are more members to arrive at balanced decisions.
The Board or Commission system is followed under following conditions:
There has been a lot of debate amongst the scholars regarding whether the public organizations and their structures inherently differ from those of private organizations.
Some support the argument saying that it does and some say that through the difference is there but it is only in the presence of red tapes in the public organizations.
Those who oppose the statement argue that, the public organizations are very different from the private organization in terms of lack of flexibility, excessive government control, lack of clear performance indicators like profit and loss and a lot of emphasis on rules and hierarchy.
Some researchers like Pugh, Hickson and Hinnings pointed out that the size of the organization and technological developments are other important determinants of the structures and hierarchy of any organization.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *