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Administrative Reform in Korea - 조성한
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작성자 : 관리자
작성일 : 2010-12-05 조회 : 8,382
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Administrative Reform in Korea
HERALD webmaster@herald.cau.ac.kr
▲ Prof. Cho Sung-han
Korean people regard public servants as authoritative, lazy, and corruptive. If that＇s true, why is the job so popular among Koreans? Ultimately, who does become public servant in Korea?
It is very difficult to become a public servant in Korea. One has to pass the very competitive recruitment exam, an exam that is so competitive that less than one percent of the candidates pass.
Why did the concept of the Korean servant become so notorious? The problem is rooted in the administrative system, not individual characters. The system is quite inefficient, authoritative, and sometimes corruptive, and this is exactly why we need administrative reform..
Actually, the Korean government has pursued administrative reform for the last 10 years. However, Korean people have not recognized any difference since the reform, not because Korean reformers have not worked hard, but because they have applied wrong measures for the reform.
The Kim Dae Jung administration brought New Public Management(NMP) paradigm into the Korean government. NPM aims at fostering a performance-oriented culture in a less centralized public sector＇.
In short, this new paradigm is characterized by the following nine main trends: 1) devolving authority, providing flexibility; 2) ensuring performance, control, accountability; 3) developing competition and choice, market-type mechanisms; 4) providing responsive services, client orientation; 5) improving the management of human resources; 6) optimizing information technology; 7) improving the quality of regulation; 8) strengthening the steering functions at the centre; 9) private sector style management.
Developed in England, NPM has spread rapidly to countries all over the world regardless of its effectiveness level. Korea is one of the countries that have applied NPM to administrative reform. However, it is not very effective because NPM bases its ideological background on neo-libertarianism which has strong individualistic cultural context while Koreans tend to be collectivistic.
This does not mean that all reform measures of NPM cannot be applied to Korea. Korean government needs to adjust NPM to Korean culture. NPM is like an empty canvass and you can paint on it whatever you like. What Korea needs is ＇a culture specific administrative reform.＇ Culture and ideology are as strong a force as economic need in the development of NPM. Local management is part of culture infrastructure; it cannot be imported in package form. Even most continental European countries such as Germany and France could introduce NPM to their countries with limited success.
Any kind of reform needs to be incremental, in fact, England＇s government calls it ＇evolution＇ instead of ＇revolution.＇ However, Korean reformers could not take incremental measures to reform government. They decided to just copy the British NPM model and they failed. Furthermore, reformers have not recognized their failure, and they still stick to their reform measures.
According to Geert Hofstede＇s research, Korea is ranked 43rd in individualism among 53 countries. That means Korea has a collectivist society. Korea does not have only collectivist culture but also vertical culture; vertical collectivist(VC) culture. The vertical cultures are more hierarchical, and the horizontal cultures emphasize equality. The personality traits of the Korean people are authoritarianism, collectivism, personalism, connectionism, secularism, and formalistic ritualism.
The Korean administrative culture has been affected by environmental national culture. Therefore, the Korean administrative culture emphasizes hierarchical relationships and order in terms of superior-subordinates and elder-youth status positions.
It stresses ingroup activity over individual activity. It has the tendency to build a social network on the basis of certain particularistic relationships and emphasizes close personalities. These traits of Korean administrative culture can be defined as vertical collectivism.
It is important to note that any specific culture is not better than any other culture for human functioning. Instead each culture pattern is functional in different situations.
For example, in horizontal individualistic societies, individuals do their own thing without restraints provided ingroups while in vertical collectivist pattern groups provide protection and security and reduce the need for personal decisions.
Management practices are culture specific, yet neither the individualistic management practices nor the collectivistic management practices are superior to one another. Generally, individualism encourages individual interests and competitiveness. Therefore, performance related payment may be appropriate in individualist society, especially in vertical individualistic society. However, collectivism encourages collective interests and cooperative behaviors. Team-based, or seniority-based payment system fit collectivist cultures.
Human resource management(HRM) practices must also be placed on a continuum between individualistically-oriented vs. collectivistically-oriented ends. Whenever a misfit occurs between an organization＇s HRM systems and the individual＇s individualism/collectivism orientation, such an organization may very well experience negative consequences like lower employee morale, lower levels of motivation, lower job performance, and possibly a higher level of employee turnover.
However, Korean administrative reform for the last decade has copied the British NPM model that is strongly rooted in individualistic neo-libertarianism and failed. Other countries, including France, Sweden and Germany, gave up applying the British NPM model to their administrative reform at the beginning level. These countries say that British NPM does not fit their culture. They have developed their own NPM nodel. If the British NPM model does not fit those countries in which individualism tendencies are much stronger than in Korea, it does not fit our culture.
Changing the culture and structure will disrupt existing power networks in organization, resulting in resistance, which can be expensive and time-consuming to overcome. It is not possible to change organizational culture that is strongly connected to national culture. Korean reformers must conduct a culture and structure diagnosis first. Then, they will get the idea about what kind of administrative reform model fits the culture.
We may need political reform before administrative reform. The trait of Korean public servant - laziness, corruption, authoritative behavior- might come from the political environment instead of the administrative system. NPM is close to efficiency while democracy is close to moral, ethics and values.
By Prof. Cho Sung-han
Dept. of Public Administration
출처: http://www.cauon.net/news/print.php?idxno=7588
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