Management Development in the Public Sector

There are a number of ways in which public sector organizations can differ from business organizations — for example performance critieria, accountability relationships and the training of officers may be very different in the public sector. Hence it may be anticipated that the approaches adopted towards management development may also be different. In this chapter we are going to concentrate on one major area of the public sector — local government. The chapter covers the changing role of local government Officers in the UK, the current philosophies about management development and the issues that these raise for the wider debate. These are illustrated by a case study from a typical local authority organization. (The main part of this chapter was contributed by Mark Sheldrake.)