Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The interaction among management, personnel, and elected officials in pursuit of good governance has sparked some unique and revolutionary ideas that have continued to precipitate a shift in how personnel and its services are organized and delivered in the public sector. Such shifts or changes can be argued to have started formally in the United States in 1883 with the passage of the Pendleton Act (Public Service Act of 1883), which began the slow process of the professionalization of the Public Service at the federal level in the United States (Batchelder and Ross, 2009:1). The Post World War 1 & 11 socio-economic and development experiences pushed Public Service Reform (PSR) into certain position of prominence as an alternative to development.
Thus, Public Service Reforms became prominent in development policy in the 1990s as governments, more often than not, undertook reforms under budgetary pressure. Pressured by macroeconomic imbalances, many governments promised to cut the size of their bureaucracy on the advice of most international agencies. For instance,in 1994, Kenya pursued downsizing and rationalization of the civil service while Tanzania pursued same in the 1980s. Ethiopia, Gambia and India equally implemented the same policy (Klugman, 1994:4). Such reforms swept across countries in South America particularly during their implementation of austerity measures.
In Nigeria, the character of public service reform is tied to its colonial root. After the 1914 amalgamation, Britain imposed a unified but alien public service on Nigeria without giving much thought to its impact on the Nigerian traditional communities with their conflicting values, interests, norms and authority structure (Kinglsey 1963).
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