Leaving the Senior Civil Service – public service bargain and beyond: The case of Estonia

Abstract

The article explores why apolitical public sector managers decide to or are forced to leave the civil service in the example of the Estonian Senior Civil Service. The article shows that the concept of public service bargain can help to understand and systematise the causes of leaving the Senior Civil Service. It is particularly useful in distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary turnover and in linking the turnover with political–administrative relations and loyalty issues. Since public service bargain does not specifically focus on voluntary exit, other approaches known from management literature are relevant for the operationalisation of voluntary turnover and complementing the public service bargain-based model for researching turnover of top executives. The empirical study maps the people who left the Estonian Senior Civil Service in 2009–2013 and analyses and systematises various causes of their departure on the basis of semi-structured interviews (70% response rate). The empirical study shows that the turnover of top executives can be considerable even without much direct political influence. It is found that job insecurity combined with the domination of individual unwritten public service bargains tends to lead to ambiguity in the perception of the roles of top executives, which in turn causes conflicts and dissatisfaction, materialising in high voluntary turnover.