Organizational Culture and Public Administration – the Quality of Customer Operations in Administrative Units in Slovenia

Abstract

The rapid transfi guration of modern society through globalization processes is changing the national state administration’s classical regulative and authoritative role into a creative evolutional partnership encompassing all subsystems of society. In fact, the creation and development of a modern administrative system is the main goal not only of ex-socialist countries but nations worldwide. We expect our public administration bodies to have the relevant skills to deal with and be aware of all the political and organizational changes taking place in the globalized world; if they are lacking it will be impossible to move from structural towards material change. In the processes of evolutionary change in public organizations, organizational culture plays a most important role because without it we cannot understand the dynamics of organizational growth and change, and why certain processes cannot be revived. In this paper the authors will analyse organizational cultures and climates and stress their importance for public administration systems. Its goal is to present and evaluate a project in the Slovenian national state administration system that has been ongoing for almost fi ve years. The project involves the comparative research of the organizational climate and satisfaction levels among civil servants and citizens (users). The authors will focus their analysis on levels of awareness of the importance of satisfaction and organizational climate in administrative organizations, given their impacts on organizational efficiency and effectiveness, and analyse the organizational climate’s effects on employee motivation.