Public Management Quality of Thai Civil Service
Abstract
This paper was from the qualitative research that aimed to analyze the quality of public administration, based on the documents analysis together with in-depth interviews and focus group discussion of the selected agencies. These agencies were the service-based departments with good evaluation scores in terms of effectiveness, including Community Development Department, Cooperative Promotion Department, Cooperative Auditing Department, while policy-based departments consisted of the Office of the Permanent Secretaries to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Department of Trade Negotiations. The selected provincial offices included Suphan Buri, Nakorn Prathom, Chai Nat, Ang Thong, and Samut Songkhram.
It was found from the study that service-based department focused on the development of their management quality to enhance efficiency and effectiveness of the service results. Most of departments emphasized the responsiveness to the people’s satisfaction or the hearing from the stakeholders. The service-based departments that exchanged and learnt the experience from the external agencies had the performance to improve their innovation services. Meanwhile, the policy-based service departments highlighted the standard of working system and the policy making and planning the in the ministerial plan with the other agencies. However, they were lack of the complete service process to people. Provinces that had theirs management quality in good level concentrated on the activities to access people sector, the activities that the local personnel can perform, and the public hearings from the local people. Yet, the major weakness of the provinces was the lack of the personnel development to cope with the rapidly changing environment in the community context.
The recommendations were that the departments and provinces should apply the guidelines for public administration development in 7 attributes that were consistent with the Good Governance principle and should adopt the criteria of public management quality into the government administrative performance commitment in order to improve the performance of public personnel and to develop leadership and change management. Moreover, the information management should be improved to support the professional executive decision-making that will change the service system to add value to the organizations and people. If the government can regularly create the innovation. The entire public sector will have the direction for discharging the results in the public sector itself and the people sector as well. It will contribute to the leap development of the public management quality to be comparable to the other leading countries. It will lead to the effectiveness in boosting the competitiveness, transparency and governance in the public and people sector in sustainable way.
