McCue, Clifford P.

The most important asset of any organization is its people (Danish & Usman,
2010). Whatever the market segment, they are the driving force behind creating and
delivering on the organization’s strategic and financial objectives. The ability to attract,
retain and motivate the necessary workforce, through use of financial rewards, is a main
determinant in the degree to which these objectives are met (Fong & Tosi, 2007; Gomez-
Mejia & Balkin, 1992b; Newman, Gerhart, & Milkovich, 2016). While there are many
approaches to pay strategy, a key aspect, and the focus of this dissertation, is the market
positioning of cash compensation. Specifically examined was the stated policy narrative
of market positioning compared to actual pay practice.
While compensation practices in the private sector have received significant
research attention, much less focus has been given to pay in academia. This work seeks
to address this apparent gap and extend our knowledge in this area. Utilizing faculty pay at Florida’s ten major public universities, this dissertation analyzes consistency between
the narrative and practice at the levels of university, department, rank, size and region.
The findings demonstrated a significant difference between pay and university but
inconsistencies across all levels with the stated narrative. Additionally, the results
indicate a widening gap between actual pay and the market average between the 2005-
2006 academic year to present.

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.

This dissertation examined the literature of cutback management in the context of the Great Recession. Specifically, it studied the relationship between cutback management policies used by county governments during the recession and revenue changes. The purpose of this dissertation was to test whether or not the percent change in revenue had an impact on the probability that cutback management policies were used in the recession. According to the cutback management literature developed in the 1970s and 1980s, there should be a relationship. The theoretical framework used for this study was the rational-approach framework, which proposes that every expenditure reducing and revenue increasing policy is enacted based on the percent decrease in revenue the government faces. This suggests that the cutback management policies are a proportional response to revenue decline. The framework was operationalized by using a binary logistic regression that used policy en actment as the dependent variable and the percent change in revenue as the independent variable. Eighty-six counties were sampled and 7 years of each county's budget book were examined for policies and financial data. The research found that eleven expenditure policies and three revenue policies had a statistically significant relationship with the percent change in revenues. This resulted in the conclusion that the framework and, therefore, the cutback management literature were useful in explaining primarily expenditure policies.