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CSS Public Administration Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service Flashcards
50 question-and-answer cards covering Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service as it is examined in CSS Public Administration. 24 of them are printed below, taken from across the deck — no signup, no paywall on the preview.
24 sample cards from the Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service deck
Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.
What is Herbert Simon's concept of 'bounded rationality' and 'satisficing'?
Bounded rationality holds that decision-makers cannot be fully rational because of limits on information, time, and cognitive capacity, so they 'satisfice' — i.e., they choose the first satisfactory/'good enough' alternative rather than the optimal one.
Distinguish programmed from non-programmed decisions.
Programmed decisions are routine, repetitive decisions handled by established rules, procedures, or policies. Non-programmed decisions are novel, unstructured, and complex one-off problems that require fresh judgment, analysis, and creativity.
Differentiate decision-making under certainty, risk, and uncertainty.
Certainty: outcomes of each alternative are fully known. Risk: outcomes are not certain but their probabilities can be estimated. Uncertainty: outcomes and/or their probabilities are unknown, so judgment, intuition, and scenario analysis are needed.
What is 'groupthink' in decision-making?
Groupthink (Irving Janis) is a defective mode of group decision-making where the desire for harmony and conformity overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives, leading to suppression of dissent, illusions of unanimity, and poor decisions.
Name common structured problem-solving techniques used by managers.
Brainstorming, the Delphi technique, the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), root-cause/'5 Whys' analysis, SWOT analysis, decision trees, cost-benefit analysis, and PEST/PESTLE analysis.
What is the communication process and its essential elements?
Communication is the transfer and understanding of meaning. Its elements are: sender (source), encoding, message, channel/medium, receiver, decoding, feedback, and the surrounding 'noise' that can distort the message.
Distinguish formal from informal communication, and name the 'grapevine'.
Formal communication follows the official chain/structure of the organization (downward, upward, horizontal). Informal communication occurs outside official channels; the 'grapevine' is the informal network through which rumours and unofficial information spread.
What are common barriers to effective communication?
Physical/environmental noise, semantic/language barriers, perceptual and psychological barriers, filtering, information overload, emotions, status/hierarchical differences, cultural differences, and poor listening.
What is 'active listening'?
Active listening is fully concentrating on, understanding, and responding to a speaker — paying attention, withholding judgment, paraphrasing/reflecting, asking clarifying questions, and providing feedback — to ensure the message is accurately received.
What are the key interpersonal/'people' skills required of a civil servant?
Communication, active listening, empathy, teamwork and collaboration, negotiation, leadership and motivation, emotional intelligence, conflict management, and the ability to build trust and rapport with colleagues and the public.
What is emotional intelligence (EI) and its main components (Goleman)?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own and others' emotions. Daniel Goleman's five components are: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
Define organizational conflict and list its common sources.
Conflict is a process in which one party perceives that another has, or is about to, negatively affect its interests. Common sources include scarce resources, incompatible goals, role ambiguity/overlap, communication breakdown, value/personality differences, and interdependence.
Name the five conflict-handling styles in the Thomas-Kilmann model.
Competing (assertive/uncooperative), Accommodating (unassertive/cooperative), Avoiding (unassertive/uncooperative), Collaborating (assertive/cooperative – win-win), and Compromising (intermediate on both).
Distinguish distributive from integrative negotiation.
Distributive (positional) negotiation is win-lose bargaining over a fixed pie where one party's gain is the other's loss. Integrative (principled/interest-based) negotiation seeks win-win solutions by expanding the pie and reconciling underlying interests.
What are the stages of Kurt Lewin's three-step model of change?
(1) Unfreezing – preparing/creating motivation to change by breaking the existing equilibrium; (2) Changing (moving) – implementing the new ways/behaviours; and (3) Refreezing – stabilizing and institutionalizing the change to make it permanent.
What is Lewin's Force-Field Analysis?
Force-Field Analysis views any situation as a balance between driving forces (pushing for change) and restraining forces (resisting change). Change occurs by strengthening driving forces, weakening restraining forces, or both, to shift the equilibrium.
What are the eight steps of Kotter's model of leading change?
(1) Create urgency, (2) Build a guiding coalition, (3) Form a strategic vision, (4) Communicate the vision, (5) Empower/remove obstacles, (6) Generate short-term wins, (7) Consolidate gains/sustain acceleration, and (8) Anchor the changes in the culture.
What are the main reasons employees resist organizational change?
Fear of the unknown, fear of loss (job, status, power, income), habit/inertia, lack of trust in management, poor communication, threat to established relationships, and lack of perceived benefit or involvement in the change.
What is the difference between eustress and distress?
Eustress is positive, motivating stress that enhances performance and well-being. Distress is negative, harmful stress that overwhelms coping capacity and damages performance and health. (Concept developed by Hans Selye.)
What is Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)?
GAS describes the body's response to stress in three stages: (1) Alarm reaction (fight-or-flight), (2) Resistance (the body adapts/copes), and (3) Exhaustion (prolonged stress depletes resources, leading to burnout/illness).
Trace the evolution of the Civil Service in the Subcontinent up to independence.
It evolved from the East India Company's covenanted servants into the Indian Civil Service (ICS) – the 'steel frame' of the Raj – formalized after the 1858 Crown takeover and the Macaulay-inspired competitive examination (1853/1855). After 1947 Pakistan inherited it as the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP).
What were the All-Pakistan Services and key occupational groups before the 1973 reforms?
The elite All-Pakistan Services were the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) and the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP), supported by central superior services like the Foreign Service, Income Tax, Customs, Audit and Accounts, and Railways — organized in rigid classes/grades with the CSP at the apex.
What were the major features of the 1973 Administrative (Bhutto) Reforms?
(1) Abolition of service-cadre labels/classes and the elite CSP; (2) introduction of a unified grading structure of 22 National Pay Scales (BPS/Grades 1–22); (3) creation of the All-Pakistan Unified Grades and lateral entry into the service; and (4) establishment of common training and the principle of equality of opportunity.
What recent civil-service reform reorganized the federal training and recruitment landscape, and name two key contemporary reform bodies/initiatives?
Reforms have included merit-based recruitment through the FPSC, performance-based promotions, and capacity-building via the Civil Services Academy/National School of Public Policy. Contemporary issues addressed include politicization, e-governance/digitalization, lack of specialization, weak accountability, and the recommendations of bodies like the Dr. Ishrat Husain Task Force on Civil Service Reform (2019).
What this deck covers
The Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service deck follows the CSS Public Administration Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service syllabus — 3 chapters and 9 topics — so questions land on material that is genuinely examinable rather than trivia around it. That works out to roughly 16.7 cards per chapter.
Answers are written to be recallable, not just readable — averaging about 253 characters, which is long enough to carry the reasoning and short enough to say out loud.
A deck like this earns its keep on the second and third pass. Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then use the cards to find the specific facts that have not stuck.
Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service flashcards FAQ
How many Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service flashcards are in this CSS Public Administration deck?
50 cards. This page previews 24 of them, sampled evenly across the deck so you can judge the difficulty before installing anything.
Are these CSS Public Administration flashcards free?
Yes. The preview here is free to read with no signup, and the full 50-card deck is free inside the Examius app.
What do the Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service cards cover?
They follow the CSS Public Administration Administrative Law, Skills and the Civil Service syllabus — 3 chapters and 9 topics — so the questions track what is actually examinable.
How should I use these flashcards?
Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then drill the deck. Examius schedules each card with spaced repetition, so cards you keep missing come back sooner and ones you know drift further apart.