«Conscientiousness» to be encouraged in Public Management in the Netherlands

Abstract

World public management reforms have revealed the increased demand for conscientiousness of office workers as the main tendency of our time. Pointing out the diversity of acts on the principles of employees’ behaviours, the author notes that they all enact honest and professional fulfillment of official duties to say nothing of the behaviour that an be misinterpreted as infringements. Considering these acts in the first part of the article, the author notices both their imperfection and an obvious merit which is to prevent all sorts of abuse and to arrest corruption in public service. The article focuses on the performance of the Bureau in the Netherlands which is to provide ethics and conscientiousness among bureaucrats in public management. The Bureau was set up within the Home Affairs Ministry in 2006 to help public offices implement its ethics and conscientiousness strategies. This experience of the Netherlands is of great concern as it shows the way of realizing the statute norm on ethics for bureaucrats.