This article summarizes a few of themost interesting findings of a comprehensive survey of human resource management best practices in state and local government. The 4-year project has examined the most enlightened human resource management initiatives extant in government agencies and provides a number of appealing reform examples that might be transportable to other governmental settings, including federal agencies. Many of the findings challenge accepted notions about the intractable nature of public personnel systems and provide potential models that can be emulated in public agencies at every level of government.
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