Development of human resources strategies in local governments changing mentality: Konya Metropolitian Municipality case

With the reflection of the change that has begun especially in 1980?s across all over the world to the local governments, these governments has been exposed to significant changes in terms of structure, operation and functions. The change that has begun to erase the traces of the understanding of the traditional bureaucratic management forced the local government units to be more responsive to the demands of citizens by emphasizing values such as effectiveness, efficiency, participation, flexibility and accountability in local governments. One of the most important aspects of the change is the differences occuring in human resource management perspectives. Human Resources Management in local governments has shifted from personnel management to Human Resources Management by following the change in the private sector. The personnel management mentality following the employees? staff personnel matters such as hiring, salary, payroll, and off days has expired with the process of change. Instead of this, Human Resources Management that sees the staff as valuable assets and believes that the satisfaction of the citizens can be obtained with the employees? satisfaction has taken effect. By regarding the employees as a strategic resource, the activities that improve their skills have gained importance. Job satisfaction which can be evaluated in conjunction with employee motivation expressing the level of satisfaction of the employee from his work; empowerment that aims the employees to take ownership of their work; performance evaluation that helps measure and improve employee success; organizational commitment that is expressed as the degree of the employee?s commitment to the organization and organizational stress management, which is one of the most important issues of our time, evaluated within the scope of development of Human Resources in local governments; have also formed the basis of the survey portion of the study. In this work, two different field studies were done to assess the use of human resources strategies in local governments in the context of Konya Municipality. The first study investigates the current understanding of human resources strategies, and the second one surveys the expectations from legislation no. 6360. It was observed that the organizational loyalty and job satisfaction were high at Konya Metropolitan Municilapity, but there was no significant effort to apply other strategies. Key Words 1. Human Resources Management in Local Government 2. Employee Empowerment 3. Job Satisfaction 4. Performance Evaluation 5. Organizational Commitment