Person-Job Fit Changes As A Consequence Of Public Management Reforms In Self-Governmental Units

The research is based on the assumption that management reforms cause changes in municipal administration and its person-job fit. The theoretical description of the problem is possible by drawing on Edward’s (1991) person-job fit theorem. Literature on modernisation concepts as e.g. the New Public Management (NPM) shows a general awareness of reforms’ consequences on the personnel. The human capital theory delivers explanations for the incentive to react of both the organisation’s executive level as well as the employees, in case management reforms cause a discrepancy in person job-fit.


The conducted empirical studies confirm that management reforms do result in changes with impact on the person-job fit. The literature research brought evidence that NPM has only been adopted partially. Since the transformation, some reforms and changes in legislation have laid the foundation for a self-governmental administration that scores compared to the EU standard as relatively modern. The investigated Polish municipalities react on the changes in the person job fit. For example, employees do learn in a self-organised way. The administration reacts on the discrepancies mainly by recruiting new staff and by reallocating the tasks. Training is not applied systematically as means to problem solving and is available in many cases only in the context of externally financed projects, and even then not oriented towards individual needs. Changes do have enormous consequences for the personnel management of municipal administration. They change the requirements for the job holders substantially, and the administrations seem not able to react on the changes in a way that the personnel is enabled to meet the requirements. Unclear is if such an objective seems feasible if one considers the extreme dimensions of change, that spread between the paradigms of socialist administration and modernisation concepts in the sense of NPM.