Key words:
competitiveness, public sector organizations, civil servants, effectiveness,
public service quality.
Competition is the basis for the dynamic development of society. Initially it has the form of
free competition of private producers in open markets and mainly the price mechanism for its
implementation in domestic and foreign markets. At the same time, the concept of competition,
which has been developing for three centuries, is changing dynamically.
The development of innovative processes in Kazakhstan is associated with the realization
that human competitiveness is the main factor in the movement of processes and innovations. It is
generally recognized that the only one factor in the effectiveness of a public sector organization is
the competitiveness of public servants and the head of a state body. The reliance on the
competitiveness of civil servants is the way to the success and effectiveness of the state body.
The competitiveness of the state body is made up of the competitiveness of individuals –
heads of state bodies and subordinates, which is reflected in the President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s
«ІЛИЯС МҰРАСЫ ЖӘНЕ АЛАШТАНУ МӘСЕЛЕЛЕРІ»
атты республикалық ғылыми-тәжірибелік студент жастар конференциясының материалдары
6
article “The Course towards Future: Modernization of Public Conscience” (17
th
of April, 2017) [1].
The era of “smart economy”, era of knowledge and high technologies has come. Time demands
new standards, a new culture and a change in mentality. That is why in the Message of President,
special attention is given to the issues of education, the training of qualified employees for the most
promising sectors, and the support of scientific personnel.
Civil servants must be competitive, educated, committed to success and self-improvement. They
must be active, healthy, proficient in languages, in order to effectively integrate into the international
environment and there, successfully competing, to take the first positions.
An analysis of literary sources on the organization of human behavior has shown that the use of
the term “competitiveness” in relation to a person as a subject of state activity is quite common.
However, in most cases, the authors, using this term, do not disclose his vision of the essence, content,
structure of the type of competitiveness in question. It means that authors who analyze the definition of
competitiveness in the labor market are far from unambiguous in their understanding. Often, the term
“competitiveness of a manager” is used as a synonym for “competitiveness of an employee”,
“competitiveness of staff”, “competitive labor potential”, “labor competitiveness”, “competitiveness of
managerial and personnel capacities”, and “Competitiveness of the employee, specialist and manager”.
Thus, the authors differently interpret the object of competitiveness in the labor market.
Analysis, used in the literature of the interpretations of human competitiveness, makes it
possible to single out two schemes reflecting different points of view on the object of competitiveness in
the civil service. Representatives of the first scheme consider labor force, labor potential, managerial
potential, human capital [2, p. 22]. They consider competitiveness in the civil service as a specific type
of commodity competitiveness, which is specified by the use value of the goods sold, its qualitative
certainty. Thus, the representatives of the first scheme identify the competitiveness of the manager with
the quality of the workforce (qualification, training profile, age, gender, etc.) and to determine the
measure of competitive advantages in the civil service compare some integral characteristics for
different competing labor forces.
However, the level of development of qualitative characteristics of civil servants, which allows
them to “compete”, pretend to “quality”, “prestigious”, “good”, etc. jobs – is not competitiveness, but
one of the indicators characterizing the functional quality of civil servants.
Secondly, the qualitative characteristics of civil servants are largely due to the needs and
requirements of its carrier, and not formed to the extent that it is necessary for the functioning of the
public authority. In connection with this, it is more legitimate to talk about the quality of labor, that is,
the degree to which the characteristics of the labor activity of civil servants correspond to the
requirements imposed on the quality of the work.
Thirdly, competitiveness in the civil service is conditioned not only by the qualitative
characteristics of civil servants, but also by the conditions of hiring and labor. Factors determining the
position of the commodity “labor force” in the civil service include: forms and types of employment,
conditions of employment and labor conditions, labor quality, employee image, work discipline,
corporate governance, labor behavior, training costs, transaction costs.
As the fundamental principle that determines the specifics and concrete-specific content of
competitiveness in the civil service, representatives of the second scheme consider the mechanism of
bringing the competitive advantages of labor (ability to work) into a functioning state.
Representatives of the second scheme believe that competitiveness in the civil service is result of
the following:
• productive abilities of a person that most fully meet the requirements for the quality of work of
a particular workplace;
• socio-economic and production-technical conditions, in which the most effective use of the
abilities of a civil servant to this work;
• dynamic coordination of civil servants and employer needs, taking place not at the expense of
the individual interests to the civil servant, and organizational goals;
• Minimization of total costs during the period of labor activity of a civil servant.
|