The Pay, Promotion, and Retention of High-Quality Civil Service Workers in the Department of Defense
Abstract
White-collar General Schedule (GS) workers in federal civil service jobs are covered by a commonly structured pay table that varies somewhat to account for differences in federal and nonfederal pay across geographic areas. Although civil service personnel managers can use special pays and other forms of compensation to help attract, retain, and motivate high-quality employees, some critics have argued that the common pay table hampers the managers' ability to manage flexibly the large and extraordinarily diverse federal GS workforce. Specifically, the critics charge that pay cannot be readily varied in such a way as to motivate higher-quality workers to enter and stay in the civil service. While they must adhere to the commonly structured pay table, personnel managers do have other tools that enable them to offer higher lifetime pay to higher-quality workers. Most notably, they can promote higher-quality workers faster. However, the degree to which individuals can be promoted quickly depends on whether they are eligible for promotion and on whether vacancies exist in higher grades in specific locations. Furthermore, even if higher-quality personnel are promoted faster and thereby receive higher earnings over their careers, whether these increases are enough to induce them to stay in the civil service is an open question.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2001
- Accession Number
- ADA392502
Entities
People
- Beth J. Asch
Organizations
- RAND Corporation