What Determines Officers’ Postings?
““Typically, the government personnel departments look at skills and experience, with particular emphasis on prior roles and sometimes education and training. However, the political executive primarily relies on matching the officers’ personalities with the requirements of the post...””
What does the political executive look for when they post civil servants in general, and the IAS in particular?
Typically, the government personnel departments look at skills and experience, with particular emphasis on prior roles and sometimes education and training. However, the political executive primarily relies on matching the officers’ personalities with the requirements of the post. This is the main reason for the mismatch between the proposals of the personnel departments and the decisions of the political executive.
In a working paper at the global Research Papers in Economics archive (RePEc,) Paul McCarthy, Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales, showed that the mismatch between the personality of workers and their job is widespread in the private sector as well.
Moreover, they found that people whose personalities were strongly aligned with their jobs had much higher levels of engagement and happiness.
Thus, much is to be said about the ‘gut’ feeling used by the political executive while posting civil servants.
There are many ways of measuring personality, but five specific traits comprise our most fundamental characteristics: extraversion - how outgoing and sociable one is; conscientiousness - how organized and disciplined one is; agreeableness - how concerned one is with social harmony; neuroticism - how nervous and sensitive one is; and openness to experience - how imaginative and curious one is.
What do these personality types mean in concrete terms for civil servants?
Neuroticism is simply ruthlessness. In other words, it is the “sensitivity and skill in coping with power dynamics” that ensures that officers are not posted out involuntarily or prematurely. One typical way used by neurotic civil servants is to avoid creating competition by, for example, holding several posts so that it becomes harder to transfer them.
Extraverted civil servants are able to direct the gaze to their own public image. Such officers are able to come across to the politicians, the public, and the press (including social media) as they want to be perceived, not what they truly are.
Agreeableness is about tact.
It is about role-playing or possessing the ability to tactfully deal with sensitive situations. One way is to say a terrible thing without hurting the other person: How to communicate bad news to a fellow officer? How to decline unsolicited and unhelpful advice from a colleague? How to respond to a nosy journalist?
Openness is about having ideas and being able to convince the political executive and key stakeholders. It also means a willingness to change one’s long-cherished views based on consistent external feedback from diverse stakeholders as well as one’s superiors and subordinates.
Conscientiousness is “selfless ambition” in officers, in which they give precedence to the ambition of the government/programme/project over their own career aspirations.
The political executive looks for clusterings of traits for different posts and this is a tacit exercise in the sense that even the political decision-maker is unable to explain why they make postings.
Agreeableness is a ‘must possess’ for nearly all postings.
Neuroticism is useful for the political executive for some posts. The flip side is that the political executive is always wary of neurotic officers.
Extraversion is valued for posts requiring optics; openness to experience matters for posts requiring transformative solutions; and conscientious officers are required where there is an inordinate focus on implementation for results.
Some caveats are in order here.
First, the political executive is compelled to do some postings knowing there is a personality mismatch. This has the potential to either create “quiet quitters” or generate misunderstandings and alienation, resulting in frustration for everyone involved.
Second, officers possessing the four “dark side” traits - bold, mischievous, colorful, and imaginative - also get rewarded with prime postings in order to achieve short-term positive performance outcomes.
Finally, the fit of personality with the post is a matter of degree, rather than an “all-or-nothing” phenomenon. For a successful career, civil servants have to depend not only on their bright side (e.g., skill, education, and prior experience and past postings) but also learn and practice “cognitive malleability” in order to control their dark side, including counterproductive or undesirable behavioral styles.
Willingness to do this leads to better postings, greater involvement in jobs, and happiness.
