HR gets in the way of public-sector line managers

It is not the poor quality of line management in the public sector that needs to be addressed for public services to be capable of responding to the challenge of budget cuts, it is the bureaucracy that prevents line management from being effective. The CIPD’s report Building productive public-sector workplaces , acknowledges that, “at the workplace level, top–down, rules-based management has often left managers and staff feeling disempowered, disengaged from their work and distrustful of senior management”. It also points out that “there is an inadequacy of public-sector line management capability in a range of performance management areas that have a direct impact on service delivery, including absence, stress and conflict management”.