Introduction to Public Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The merit system was first introduced in Prussia.

In the eighteenth century the Prussian kings, Frederick William I and Frederick the Great, built a professional bureaucracy recruited through examinations and trained in the cameral sciences. Prussia is therefore usually cited as the first modern state to recruit civil servants on merit.

The other countries came later. In India, open competition for the Indian Civil Service began in 1855 under the Charter Act of 1853. In England, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1853) proposed it and open competition became the rule by the Order in Council of 1870. In the USA, the Pendleton Act of 1883 introduced the merit system to replace the spoils system.

Answer: D

The remark describes advisory staff.

Staff agencies in the classical sense have no authority of command. Their role is to study problems, gather information and give advice to the line officials who take decisions. Because they cannot order anyone, they must persuade: they 'sell' their ideas to the line rather than 'tell' it what to do, which is exactly the point of the quotation.

Functional staff, in the sense used by Taylor and others, can exercise authority over a specialised function, so they do command in that field. Control staff and technical staff (such as audit or engineering units) may also carry delegated authority over procedures. The defining feature of pure advisory staff is the lack of any power to command.

Answer: C

Self enforcing discipline is a function of high morale.

Morale is the attitude of employees towards their work, their group and the organisation. Where morale is high, people identify with the organisation's goals and follow its rules willingly, so discipline comes from within rather than being imposed. That is what self-enforcing discipline means.

Command, authority and control all describe discipline imposed from above: an order given, a right to give it, and the checking of results against standards. They can secure obedience, but obedience obtained that way is enforced by the superior, not by the employee, so none of them is the source of self-enforcing discipline.

Answer: B

The correct code is (a)-(3), (b)-(4), (c)-(1), (d)-(2).

• (a) The Hatch Act, which restricts the political activity of US federal employees, was passed in 1939.
• (b) The Northcote-Trevelyan Report on the organisation of the British civil service is dated 1853.
• (c) The Pendleton Act, which introduced the merit system in the USA, was passed in 1883; the list prints 1833, which is the only date left for it.
• (d) The Kothari Committee on recruitment policy and selection methods for the civil services reported in 1976.

Pairs (a), (b) and (d) are firm, and only this code has all three, so every other code is wrong.

Answer: C

Locus is the institutional 'where' of the field.

In Nicholas Henry's well-known account of the paradigms of public administration (building on Robert Golembiewski), each phase is described by its locus and its focus. The locus is the institutional 'where' of the discipline, for example the government bureaucracy, and the focus is the specialised 'what', such as the principles of administration or management techniques.

So 'what' belongs to focus, not locus. 'When' and 'how' are not part of the locus-focus scheme at all.

Answer: A

The key is A: both statements are true and R explains A.

'Instrumentality' describes the administrative system as an instrument of the political executive: it carries out decisions it did not make, and so it is subordinate to political control (A). In a parliamentary democracy the executive sits in and answers to the legislature, and the permanent administration answers to the executive, so the chain of accountability that runs up to the legislature is why political control over administration is accepted (R).

I found no published source that uses the phrase 'instrumentality role' with this reasoning, so the link from R to A is the logic of the statements and not a confirmed textbook line. Options B, C and D each call one statement false or unrelated, which does not hold for either.

Answer: D

The one that is not a kind of staff is line.

John Pfiffner classified staff agencies into three kinds: general staff, who advise the chief executive on overall policy; technical (specialised) staff, who give expert advice in a particular field; and auxiliary staff, who provide common services such as personnel, purchasing and accounts to the whole organisation.

Line agencies are not staff at all. They carry out the primary purposes of the organisation and exercise command, while staff agencies advise and assist them. So line is the odd one out.

Answer: B

The T-group is an example of sensitivity training.

The T-group (training group) was developed in 1947 at the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine, from the work of Kurt Lewin's associates. Small unstructured groups discuss their own interactions here and now, so that members become aware of how they affect others and how others see them. That is the method known as sensitivity training.

Role play and management games simulate work situations; the syndicate method divides trainees into small groups that study an assigned problem and report back; 'incidence training' is not the name of the T-group method. None of them describes the unstructured self-awareness group.

Answer: C

The factor that is not a determinant of span of control is informal relations.

The standard determinants of how many subordinates one supervisor can control are the nature of the work (how uniform or routine the functions are), the ability and personality of the leader and the subordinates, the geographical location or dispersal of the work, the time the supervisor has, and the age and stability of the organisation.

Functional uniformity, the leader's ability and geographical location are all on that list. Informal relations among employees are part of the human relations side of organisation, but they are not counted among the determinants of the span.

Answer: D

The incorrect statement is D: classical theory does not give adequate attention to formal and informal groups.

Classical (administrative management) theory, associated with Taylor, Fayol, Gulick and Urwick and, in its structural form, Weber, treats the organisation as a formal structure built on universal principles such as division of labour, unity of command, span of control and POSDCORB. It paid little attention to informal groups, which the Hawthorne studies and the human relations school brought in later. So D reverses the theory's position.

Statements B and C describe the theory correctly. Statement A, that 'classical' is the name Simon gave it, could not be confirmed: Simon is known for attacking these principles as 'proverbs of administration', but I found no source showing he coined the label. D is the one statement that is certainly wrong, which fits the key.