Employee Satisfaction in the Public Sector

摘要

It is now widely recognized that the age of knowledge society has come and many private, but also public organization are changing their style of work, organization and culture. A competent public administration is the key of a healthy society, but an incompetent one leads into severe decline. In this context, a flexible system of personnel management is a "sine qua non" requirement and an organizational culture that listens and take care of the employees needs is essential. In fact, personnel management policies can change the work environment and the employee's satisfaction. Employee's satisfaction is a subject that has appeared many times over the past decade in academic research but also in organizational analysis. This paper presents an organizational study about employee satisfaction and describes the efforts and approaches made by the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in his initiative to reform the human resources management, especially regarding the employees needs. The methodologies used are the empirical research, legislative scanning and a very complex survey applied on 1114 employees of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which represents the base of the human resources management reform. The role of this survey was to identify the employees work satisfaction taking into considerations various aspects: ministry strategy, work conditions, financial aspects, training, internal communication, performance evaluation and promotion of personnel, ethic aspects, career path and career development, team work and the relation with the management. The paper presents the results of this survey and the legislative and organizational aspects of the reform started in 2004. The opportunities and negative effects of the current financial crisis had been also analyzed. At the end of the paper, we consider some conclusions.