The Big Question for Performance Management: Why Do Managers Use Performance Information?

Abstract

This article proposes that understanding public employee use of performance information is perhaps the most pressing challenge for scholarship on performance management. Governments have devoted extraordinary effort in creating performance data, wagering that it will be used to improve governance, but there is much we do not know about the factors associated with the use of that information. This article examines the antecedents of selfreported performance information use from a survey of local government managers. The results show that public service motivation, leadership role, information availability, organizational culture, and administrative flexibility all affect performance information use.

Organizational and Individual Determinants of Evidence Use by Managers in Public Human Service Organizations

“…A few studies have found support for the contention that human service managers use evidence more than other agency staff (Lee et al, 2013;Moynihan & Pandey, 2010;Thorsteinsson & Sveinsdottir, 2013). However, because no study of human service practitioner evidence use has differentiated between administrators, middle managers, and supervisors and because few studies have controlled for individual covariates of formal organizational role (such as professional experience), additional research is warranted.…”

“…These factors include practitioner perceptions of (a) the usefulness of research and collaboration with researchers (Chagnon et al, 2010); (b) skill as a practitioner (Collins-Camargo et al, 2011); (c) skill and confidence in using and evaluating research (Gray et al, 2013); (d) relevance and usefulness of practice research (Humphries, Stafinski, Mumtaz, & Menon, 2014;Thorsteinsson & Sveinsdottir, 2013); and (e) degree of public service motivation (Moynihan & Pandey, 2010). Because no study has been able to disentangle these correlates of evidence use, no consistent understanding has emerged from the literature concerning how these factors inform evidence use.…”

“…Prior research has not examined the influence of these factors on human service managerial evidence use, despite suggestions that the intrinsic beliefs of managers impact managerial decision making (Moynihan & Pandey, 2010). Following Rogers (2003), we define an innovation as an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new within a specific social setting, and we understand innovation-mindedness to refer to the willingness of practitioners to search for and incorporate innovations into their repertoire of daily activity.…”

Uncovering the Circumstances of Performance Information Use Findings from an Experiment

“…The vast majority of the literature on performance information use in the public sector relies upon observational studies, and this approach has enabled researchers to examine the effect of environmental, organizational, job and individual factors reported by a survey respondent (Moynihan & Pandey, 2010). In the more limited literature on performance information use in budgeting, observational studies have resulted in researchers assuming that more data, better data, or data that shows variation in performance outcomes will be correlated with aggregated self-reports of data use or actual patterns of budget change.…”

The Implementation of Performance Management in European Central Governments: More a North-South than an East-West Divide

“…A growing body of research has explored how public managers and politicians use performance information and has started to identify antecedents of such use (e.g. Moynihan and Pandey 2010;Van Dooren and Van de Walle 2008;Taylor 2011;Hammerschmid et al 2013a; for a systematic overview, see Kroll 2015). A striking feature of most of this research on performance management is a strong reliance on evidence from Anglo-Saxon countries, Scandinavia and a few other countries, such as the Netherlands, and an absence of empirical research evidence from other countries (for an overview see Boyne 2010b).…”