Assessing and Improving Culture and Organizational Performance of the Romanian Public Administration

Abstract

Organizational performance has become an important issue for public organizations as they face increasing demands to demonstrate that they generate relevant outputs for citizens and beneficiaries.

This paper characterizes the concept of organizational performance and highlights both the importance of performance assessment and the relation with performance improvement in public sector. Different approaches to performance assessment in Romanian Public Administration are briefly described. Lastly, it introduces a system of performance assessment for civil servants in public organizations, for which the present procedures were developed by the Romanian Government. Civil servants are frequently facing a growing degree of politicization in the Romanian public services, but they are not really appreciated for their performances.

The research we have performed clearly highlights the essential relation between the process of professionalization of the public administration employees, described by specifying the influence of certain factors, organizational culture of Romanian public organizations and the organizational performance actually measured in some public organizations in the country.

Keywords: organizational culture, performance, public services, public administration, civil servants

JEL Classification: H59, P42