The human resources capacity of Endumeni Municipality as a developmental local government institution

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The post-apartheid era in South Africa has been marked by a whole range of importantchanges. At local government, these changes have been manifested by, among otherthings, the change in strategy from regulatory to developmental local government.Interms of the open systems approach to organisational change, changes in one part of anorganisation need to be complemented by matching changes in other parts of theorganisation. This is the premise that forms the basis of this study. It is arguedparticularly that the success of developmental local government hinges, to a large extent,on complementary changes being made in other departments of a municipality.The study focuses on one of these departments, namely the human resources (HR.)department of a municipality. It investigates Endumeni Municipality, and researcheswhether it has the necessary HR capacity to cope with the new strategy of developmentallocal government. This is subsequently followed by recommendations derived from thefindings.HR capacity is defined as the combination of the following key variables:strategic partnership between the HR function and other functions of amunicipality;integration of HR policies, systems and competencies with the developmentalmission of a municipality;coherence among the different components of the HR strategy;flexibility of the HR strategy; andAlignment of the culture of a municipality with its developmental mission. The study is descriptive in character. It makes use of a combination of qualitative andquantitative methods of investigation. The qualitative method comprises interviews withkey informants and an analysis of official documents. The quantitative method, on theother hand, consists of a questionnaire that is administered to the Councillors of themunicipality.The study came to a conclusion that Endumeni Municipality lacks the HR capacity tocarry out its developmental functions. To remedy this situation, the followingrecommendations have been suggested:(i) The current role of the HR section has to be reviewed with the view to elevate itto the level of a strategic partner.(ii) The HR competencies, policies and practices of the municipality are stillembedded in the outdated system of regulatory local government. These mustalso come up for review so that they can be re-aligned with developmental localgovernment.(iii) There is generally lack of co-ordination among the various components of HRstrategy. These must be re-aligned so that they can complement each other.(iv) The municipality is currently finding it difficult to discard the old HR strategies, apoint which suggests rigidity on the part of these strategies. Inorder to cope withthe changing environmental conditions, the municipality needs to have someflexibility in its HR strategies.(v) Finally, the prevailing culture still shows elements, which support the old system.This has to be addressed in order to create a new culture that is consistent withdevelopmental local government.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University