Recruitment is critical for equipping public service organizations with the competencies required to advance the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is particularly salient for public utilities, hybrid organizations mandated to contribute to the SDGs through essential services in water, waste, and energy management. This study examines employer attractiveness for profiles considered critical to SDG implementation in Italian utilities. Drawing on self-determination theory, we combine semi-structured interviews with HR and Employer Branding managers from 16 utilities with two discrete-choice experiments involving STEM and vocational-technical students and professionals. Salary and competence-related opportunities are consistently important across both groups. Remote work does not significantly affect STEM respondents’ choices, whereas workplace proximity is the strongest driver for vocational-technical respondents. Relatedness, operationalized as environmental and community impact, is not a significant differentiating attribute, suggesting that in organizations whose public value mission is already highly visible, social and environmental impact may function as a baseline expectation.
Teacher turnover poses a significant challenge to educational quality worldwide, with turnover intention serving as a critical precursor to actual turnover. This study explores how people management—defined as the integration of the implementation of human resource management practices and leadership behavior—affects teachers’ intentions to leave their positions. Grounded in conservation of resources theory, we examine how people management can serve as a crucial resource in reducing turnover intentions by alleviating role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion, two key issues in the teaching profession. Role ambiguity arises from the increasing demands placed on teachers, while emotional exhaustion exacerbates intentions to leave. Our results show support for the (serial) mediating role of role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion, providing new insights into how people management impacts teacher retention. The findings contribute to the understanding of how people management activities can effectively support teachers, reducing turnover intentions and ultimately enhancing overall education quality.
This study examines how sustainable human resource management (SHRM) has been incorporated into public sector HRM policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand before and after the introduction of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative analysis of HRM policies from 10 local councils between 2010 and 2021, it explores how sustainability concerns across social, economic, and environmental domains were integrated into public HRM. The findings show that sustainability entered public HRM primarily through incremental layering onto existing HRM frameworks rather than transformational change. Following the SDGs, policy attention to equity, diversity, and wellbeing increased; however, broader social justice commitments remained uneven, while environmental sustainability received limited attention. By examining HRM policies as organizational signals, the study contributes to public HRM and SHRM scholarship by showing how sustainability priorities are communicated before implementation and may remain constrained by institutional logics of compliance, efficiency, risk management, and organizational performance.
Public-sector classification systems accumulate classification drift, a widening gap between what employees actually do, how their work is described, and how they are compensated. Because classification shapes pay, role comparison, and internal equity at scale, classification drift quietly compounds into measurable inequity. At a large U.S. urban public school district (the District), this drift manifested as 435 employees sharing the title "Specialist" across 24 pay grades ($47,000-$125,000). This article describes PRISM (Progressive Refinement and Intelligence Synthesis Model), a multi-model AI framework developed with a research-university partner's Data Science Institute that introduces validation friction at high-stakes decision points. Rather than automating approvals, PRISM surfaces disagreement between independent AI models and routes ambiguous cases to human reviewers with a structured evidence package. Across 992 positions, 173 cases (17%) were flagged for escalated review. This article describes what public HR offices, with or without AI, can do to address classification drift.
This qualitative case study examines how a federal field detachment sustained operational continuity during the initial implementation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) workforce reforms. Centered on the loss of a clearance-restricted Security Officer, the study draws on interviews, surveys, and organizational artifacts to examine how responsibilities were redistributed under constrained staffing conditions. Findings indicate that mission-essential operations were maintained through task redistribution, knowledge capture, leadership, and informal coordination; however, these adaptive responses also increased workload concentration, exposed dependence on undocumented institutional knowledge, and heightened reliance on individual effort. The study distinguishes operational continuity from organizational resilience by demonstrating that sustained mission performance can mask underlying degradation in organizational capacity. The findings extend beyond the DOGE reforms and offer practical lessons for workforce restructuring, continuity planning, succession management, and organizational resilience across public and private organizations.
