The New Dispensation In South African

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Since the new dispensation in South African, as many developing countries, people live with a hope that their lives will change. The state organs are expected to provide effective and efficient service to all citizens. More than fifteen years in democracy but citizens still crying about the lack of service delivery from the government departments including complaining about the South African Police Service ,failing to meet the their expectations. From all the policies and laws developed in this country to try meet the expectations of the communities when it comes to service delivery the department’s still fail to provide the quality service to the community.

in many countries the police force or service is managed by the government ministry and the person appointed in the highest position in police is appointed politically with no policing background with the ministerial rank.in some instances the top leadership of the police will be guided by political influence that may disrupt the main purposed of the police organization because of political influence.in South Africa the South African Police Service is mandated by the parliament in the constitution of RSA 108of 1996 section 205(c).

the South African Police Service as the public entity has a responsibility to the countries safety and its inhabitants this can only be done by deployment of police member within the country from the station levels attending to the needs of the community, controlling the entrance and the exit to the country (border policing), and the various policing units which specialize on special operations. The police agency is faced with various challenges when it comes to service delivery issues, there are several factors which contribute to this, such as failing to implement policies, lack of leadership/management, and absenteeism etc. on this study will be evaluating the impact of absenteeism on service delivery, and the factors that causes absenteeism, within the policing environment, Particularly at Boksburg SAPS.

Definitions

Absenteeism: can be defined as: being absent from work without good reason

Patton and Johns (2007) define absenteeism as an individual’s lack of physical Presence at a given location and time when there is a social expectation for him or her to be there.

Service delivery: Fox & Meyer (1995:118) define service delivery as the provision of public activities, benefits, or satisfactions to citizen. This is actually the provision of a service or product by the government, to the citizens as expected by the citizens and mandated by Acts of Parliament. Therefore service delivery can either be tangible (products) or intangible (services).

2. Research problem statement

Absenteeism has negative impact on the much anticipated delivery of service to the community by the South African Police Service.

3. Research Questions

Government employees are appointed with the hope that they’ll carry their office duties with pride honor, honest dedicated and willingness to assist the communities; they supposed to render effective service to:

What impact is absenteeism has on service delivery in the Policing environment?

What is the relationship between absenteeism and service delivery?

Why employees stay away from work?

What are the kinds of absenteeism from wok?

4. Research objectives

Is to find methods to combat absenteeism and improve service delivery building on the already existing legal frameworks.

4.1 Primary objective

Due to high demand of service delivery from the government departments this research aims:

To establishing the reasons for employees staying away from work frequently.

To analyses the cause and manifestations of absenteeism to service delivery.

To analyses the impact of absenteeism on service deliver

4.2 Secondary objective

To propose solutions on how to reduce and manage absenteeism, in order to improve service delivery on other government departments including policing.

5. Central theoretical statements

Once a researcher had stated his objectives it is necessary to formulate a central theoretical statement, which is equivalent to a hypothesis in quantitative research, in qualitative researchers use it to guide the research process. The researcher formulated the following central theoretical statement:

Investigating the relationship between absenteeism and service delivery in the policing environment, evaluating the legal frame in relation to absenteeism and service delivery and Evaluating the common reason’s reported for staying away from work.

6. Research Methodology

The research methodology which will be applied here will be both literature review an empirical investigation.

6.1 LITERATURE REVIEW

Absenteeism in the stressful policing environment may have positive results as members does needs some time off and regroup themselves. traditionally absent has been viewed as an indicator of poor individual performance as well as a breach of an implicit contract between employee and employer. it was seen as a management problem ,and framed in economic or quasi-economic terms more recent scholarship seeks to understand absenteeism as an indicator of psychological medical ,social adjustment to work. High absenteeism in the work place may be indicative of poor moral, but absents can also be caused by work place hazards or sick building syndrome.

According to McNeil(2011)while most employees can affect the bottom line negatively impacting productivity, work quality, morale and customer service and satisfaction, more fundamentally, excessive absenteeism strikes at the heart of the employment bargain –that employers pay employees in exchange for work. McNeil (2011) identify two types of absenteeism which according to the law must be dealt with within different ways:

Blameworthy ,or culpable, absenteeism occurs when an employee fail to attend work without a reasonable explanation .for example an employee who over sleeps through her alarm clock ,or takes a sick day when she is not sick,

Innocent or none culpable absenteeism occurs when an employee is, for reasons outside her control, not able to work. Example an employee cannot perform her duties at work due to illness or injury is absent for none culpable reason.

But kelchner . say worker absenteeism leaves unfair slack or perform the duties of the missing employee .when the company expects workers to do the work of other employees without any recognition from management of the problem ,it affect morale. Employees in this position must perform their job duties as well as the work of the absent workers, which can cause stress and fatigue. The company experience low productivity when employees are missing on the job. Employees may experience low moral because of the failer to meet productivity goals. supervisor and managers under stress to make up for the lower productivity can damage the employer and worker relationship, which affects the morale of all workers, low worker output is an indicator of poor employee morale, which can negatively affect the working conditions in the company.,

Positive negative

Individual

Reduction of job-related stress

Meeting of nonwork-role obligations

-benefit from compensatory nonworking activities

-Compliance with norms to be absent

Loss of pay

-discipline ,formal and informal

-increased accidents

-altered job perception

Co-workers

Job variety

Skill development

Overtime pay

Increased work load

Undersured overtime

Increased accidents

Conflict with absent worker

Work group

Crew knowledge of multiple jobs

Greater crew flexibility in responding to absenteeism and to production problems

Increased coordination problems

Decreased costs

More grievances

Increased accidents

Organization management

Greater job knowledge based in work force

Flexibility

Weakened power position

Increased cost in processing grievances

Union-officers

Articulated and strengthened power position

Increased solidarity among members

Less earnings

Decline in work reputation

Aggravated marriage and child problems

Family

Opportunity to deal with health or illness problems

Opportunity to manage marital problems

Maintenance of spouse’s earnings

Less earnings

Decline in work reputation

Aggravated marriage and child problems

Society

Reduction of job stress and mental health problems

Reduction of marital-related problems

Participation in community political processed

Loss production

Naylor, Pritchard, and ilgen, 1980

Absenteeism should be monitored and managed as it has a negative impact on the service delivery; absenteeism and service delivery are related and work hand in hand.

Barnad (2012) argues that serial absenteeism by police officers who abuse their basic right to sick leave is undermining efforts to combat and prevent crime. Not only that ,but it is a slap in the face to the many brave and hard-working police officers who put their lives on the line to keep South Africans safe. Service delivery and our collective fight against crime should not be derailed by police officers who abuse the system for their own selfish gain.

According to Orrick (2004) abuse of sick leave reduce the effectiveness and efficiency of the department. The department is less effective because supervisors have to reassign duties of the absent employee to other staff. This results in less time being available to answer citizen calls for service or to focus on proactive and preventive duties. The national institution of ethics has found abuse of sick leave can be a symptom of a troubled employee. The NIE found that some employees, driven by feelings of entitlement because of perceived mistreatment by the organization. This willful violation of the department’s policies is considered an administrative commission that is, the employee knows the policy requirements but chooses to intentionally violate them anyway.

Absenteeism occurs, among other things, where the employee is away from work for short periods. It is the unauthorized absence of the employee from work, and includes arriving late, leaving early, and taking extended tea or lunch breaks. The employee has a common-law duty to ‘enter and remain in service’ of the employer. An employee who is absent from work is in breach of this common-law duty (Grogan op cit at 51-2; John Grogan Dismissal, Discrimination, and Unfair Labour Practices 2 ed (2007) at 291).

Absenteeism in south African police service has impact on service delivery there are various reasons for being absent to work .whether being absent to work due to annual leave,AWOL, sick leave, special leave ,study leave, etc. this may have impact on the service to the community again this may increase productivity as members may double their effort to their work as than the usually.

6.2 EMPIRICAL STUDY

6.2.1 Interviews-

A standardized open-end interview will be conducted with the employees of the South African Police Service at Boksburg Police Station; the first group will be the administrator/clerks at human resource office. And the second group will be the commissioned officers who are responsible to the different component (Client Service Centre, Visible Policing and Crime detection).

The interviews questions will be structure to fit the management of annual leaves, special leaves, study leaves, sick leaves and (AWOL) leave without any notification and the supervision of the members. And impact on service delivery.

6.2.2 Informal conversational interview

6.2.3 The questionnaires

Questionnaires will be structured in the way that it must establish the impact absenteeism has to service delivery and also the strain that member feels during the absent of their colleagues. This questionnaires will be given to the third group will be the members who are directly dealing with the community on the daily basis when on duty non-commissioned officers

Research design

The research is designed to evaluate impact of absenteeism to service delivery by targeting the members appointment in terms of south African Police Service act 685 of 1995 at Boksburg Police Station as this members are the face of the station to the community and they directly get involved with the community in their policing area.by being in the Client Service Centre and also attending complaints and patrolling doing crime prevention.

Unit of analysis

Welman at el(2008:213)in qualitative research the solution is therefore to convert words to numbers or symbols but to retain the words and use these together with the numbers/symbols throughout the analysis. Collected data will be coded the reason for coding is to analyse and make sense of the data that have been collected

Sample and sample type

(De Vos, et al. (2008:223) a sample comprises elements or a subset of the population considered for actual inclusion in the study, or can it be viewed as a subset of measurements drawn from a population in which we are interested. The sampling type that will be applied on this study is a non-probability purposive sampling will be applied. (Wilman et al .2005:69)purposive sampling researcher s rely on their experience, ingenuity and /or previous research findings to deliberately obtain units of analysis in such a manner that the sample they obtain may be regarded as being representative of the relevant population.

The employees of the South African Police Service who are in the management of different components and sub-components will be asked to participate including the leave administrators in the human resource component and the members are directly provide service to the community in the Client Service Centre ,(CSC) Visible Policing ( Vispol ) and the Crime detection component. None probability sampling strategy will be applied.

Data collection methods

Interviews will be conducted and will be recorded on an audio device to collect data .Patton (2002:342) discusses three basic approaches to collecting data through open-end interviews. three alternative s interviewing methods as follows:

-Informal conversational interview

-standardized open-end interview

-general interview guide approach

Data will be recoded on a tape recorder to allow the researcher to concentrate on taking strategic and focuses notes, rather than attempting verbatim notes. Notes can serve to formulate new questions as the interview progresses.as it serves as a back –up in the event the recorder has a fault or malfunctioned.

Identification of variables

Service delivery is the dependent variable in this study as it depends on the presents of employees ,independent variable is the absenteeism

Data analyses

Systematic, sequential, verifiable and continuous requires time; is jeopardized by delay; seeks to enlighten; should entertain alternative explanations; is improved by feedback; and a process of comparison (Morgan &Krueger 1998:vol.6:3-17; Krueger & Casey 2000:128; 130). The aim of analysis is to look for trends and patterns that reappear within a single focus group or among various focus groups, De Vos at el (2008; 373).The potential influence of demographic characteristic on the different type of absenteeism will be used to determine absenteeism according to the categories on variables such as: gender, race, age and the rank of the respondents.

Data that will be collected from the participants will be analyze according the different groups in a systematic way that will allow the researcher to be able to analyze transcript of individual interview and of a group in a table format to be able to understand the findings.

7. Ethical considerations

This study will put in place a number of precautionary measures as to observe research ethics. A consent form will be issued to respondents to fill in if they agree to a letter of request presented to them by the researcher. The letter of request will have a clear brief statement stipulating the respondents’ will remain anonymous as well as to withdraw from the interview when they deem fit to do so. The letter will also stipulate that information provided will be treated with the highest levels of confidentiality. No respondent will be coerced or tricked to participate in answering the questionnaire.

Neumann (2007:50) notes some important law and codes of ethics that recognise clear prohibitions. These include to never causing unnecessary or irreversible harm to subjects; securing prior voluntary consent when possible; and never unnecessarily humiliating, degrading, or releasing harmful information about specific individuals that was collected for research purposes.

8. Chapter division

Chapter 1: Introduction and background of the study. This chapter introduces the study. It discusses the study, the methods used to collect data as well as how data will be analysed.

Chapter 2: Literature review on the study. This chapter review literature on the topic from both secondary and primary sources.

Chapter 3: Research design and methodology. This chapter explains the method of research that was used and the research design followed.

Chapter 4: Data presentation and analysis. This chapter presents and analyses the collected data

Chapter 5: Summary, findings, recommendations and conclusion. This chapter summarizes the entire study whereby the findings and recommendations will be provided as well as the conclusions reached.