Integrated Human Resource Management in Public Organizations. Practices, Philosophy of Actors and Perspectives in the Context of New Public Management : The Case of the Automobile Insurance Company of Quebec (Saaq)

The last quarter of the nineteenth century undoubtedly marks a watershed in human resource management in public organizations. Indeed, those organizations undergo deep changes which bring with them a number of challenges. Now, at the time when many aspects of public organization management are being questioned, these unprecedented changes, currently contained by the name of New Public Management, seem to call into question radically the culture of disenchantment and the traditional Weberian bureaucratic model which has prevailed for a long time in public organizations. After the technological, economic, legislative, demographic and sociocultural challenges, public organizations face the challenge of Human Resource Management today, along with remuneration and recruitment policies, career management, personnel evaluation standards and practices of mobilization which are continuously enriched by increasingly sophisticated tools and instruments. This article examines the evolution of human resource management practices in the Automobile Insurance Company of Quebec (SAAQ) and suggests that the philosophy of the actors evolved greatly to more innovative practices, and that human resource management in the public sector tends to adopt a new approach of personalization, anticipation, shared responsibilities and seems to privilege solutions related to flexibility. However, it should be specified that in spite of this progress, we can still note the prevalence of certain relational subversive attitudes and some Human Resource Management (HRM) practices which continue to deny the intrinsic identity of individuals, their collective reality, their group affiliation and their creative potential