ABSTRACT
Public personnel administration is the management of a system whereby public agencies recruit, compensate, and discipline their employees. The system is normally characterized by a watchdog differentiation between the structures that perform personnel tasks and structures that protect employee rights and insulate the process from politics. Wallace Sayre, an expert in public administration, is widely cited as the source of the comment: public and private management systems are fundamentally alike in all unimportant ways. Public personnel administration is illustrative of this truism because agencies must seek to sustain the highest levels of professionalism in their operations and yet be responsive to the desires of the elected officials whom they serve. Because the United States lacked a nobility whose members assumed hereditary positions, the principal obstacle to professionalization was the patronage system of rewarding faithful party members with jobs in government with little regard to their qualifications.
