Task Specialization In The Public Administration Profession: A Job Analysis Of Public Procurement Practitioners

This dissertation examines task specialization in the public administration
profession through studying the job tasks that a public procurement practitioner
performs, manages, and both performs and manages. The purpose of this
dissertation was to establish a baseline to benchmark what these practitioners
actually do on their jobs. Factor analysis was used to study a data set of 2,549
respondents that were administered a survey by the Universal Public
Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) in 2012. The research question to be
answered involved addressing what job tasks public procurement practitioners
perform, manage, and both perform and manage. Hypotheses were examined
that predicted task specialization existing within public procurement to the extent
that practitioners in more senior job positions display more task specialization
and that practitioners from larger organizations also display more task specialization. A review of literature discusses the alternative perspectives on
what constitutes professionalism in the public sector. The reasons for focusing on
public procurement professionalism were subsequently presented through the
literature. The various views of what entails professionalism in public
administration were discussed as to responsibility (Stivers, 1994), sociological
issues (Simon, 1947), constitutional issues (Lowi, 1995; Rohr, 1986), technical
specialization and empirical rigor (Parsons, 1939), as means of contextualizing
the nature of public administrators’ roles and responsibilities in conjunction with
the job tasks that are executed.
Factor analysis was conducted on 75 job tasks in order to identify
relationships between practitioner job tasks for the purposes of finding out what it
is that public procurement practitioners actually do for their work. The job tasks
found to share relationships may be grouped together for further inquiry into the
nature of the relationships between job tasks and overarching competency areas
of related job tasks. Additionally, factor analyses were conducted to identify
relationships between job tasks in public procurement and control variables such
as organization size and job position, which were predicted to impact whether or
not practitioners perform, manage, both perform and manage, or do neither, for
each of the job tasks surveyed.