The Commonwealth Senior Executive Service: An approach to improving the public service

Abstract

A generic personnel management system known as the Senior Executive Service (SES) has become one of the preferred solutions for improving public services in many countries such as the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand. Canada also has a SES termed the Management Category. Although the same basic principles apply to all the SESs, the countries have developed different forms of the SES based on the extent to which they value the particular underpinning principles. The Australian SES was influenced by the US experience. Thus it is worthwhile examining the principles of the US SES to provide background for a discussion of the Australian SES.
This research essay attempts to establish the extent to which the Australian Commonwealth SES system has improved the public service. Although there are many elements of the SES and other administrative reforms that have an important impact on the degree of success and failure of the SES as a whole, the scope of this paper is limited to four specific issues. They are recruitment and selection, the SES managerial skills required or core competency, mobility and performance appraisal and pay. These four issues are considered to be key elements of the SES system.
Key questions for examination are: theoretical framework underpinning the overall SES system; objectives, major characteristics, management practices and problems of the recruitment and selection, core competency, mobility, and performance appraisal and pay. Each of these four will be examined against its objectives and whether or not they are achieved. As a result of this examination, it can be determined whether or not the SES system achieves the overall goals of public service reform in terms of increasing efficiency effectiveness, and accountability of the public servants to ministers.
The methods used for examining these issues are primary data, such as government reports, guidelines, rules and regulations, and secondary data such as academics and practitioners’ works. There is difficulty in any attempt to answer whether the four specific elements of the SES have contributed to an improvement of the public service as a whole. This is because there are other major elements and characteristics of the SES and other administrative reforms that have contributed to the degree of overall success or failure of the SES system which are beyond the scope of this paper to examine. Thus the conclusion will be based only on an analysis of the four mentioned above. A detailed outline of this essay follows.

Date of Award	1994
Original language	English
Supervisor	John HALLIGAN (Supervisor)