Managerial challenges of performance management : a cross-national exploration

Abstract

As a consequence of the shrinkage of the world produced by the Internet and the World Wide Web, developments in public administration in one part of the world are observed and potentially copied in others very quickly. In principle, the speed of travel on the information highway greatly accelerates the pace of the diffusion of innovation. Using the case of performance measurement and management, this paper explores how political and cultural differences affect the process of technological borrowing in management reform. By comparing the experience of the introduction of performance management in a number of agencies, in a number of fields of public service, and in several countries, this paper aims to identify common and divergent patterns of managerial adaptation out of reform ideas.

The starting point of this paper is that so much energy has gone into the task on defining and measuring outcomes, but comparatively little attention has been devoted to the managerial challenge of using outcome measures to improve results. For example, in the latest reinvention of American government, a central theme has been the idea of "managing for results." One of the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act was that all federal agencies define their objectives and develop measures that they will regular report on. At the same time a variety of forces, especially the call for accountability and the emergence of performance-based contracting, have converged on the nonprofit sector in United States, also requiring the development of outcome measures.

In England during 1990s the public sector was similarly engaged in a process of outcome measurement development, which began under Prime Minister Thatcher in the form of an emphasis on "value for money" and continued in the Blair government's own reinvention efforts. As a consequence there is considerable literature on performance measurement in the public sector in England. A review of that literature shows that, as in United States, managing results poses bigger challenges then measuring them. In Latin America, the government of Chile, among others has also undertaken significant performance measurement and evaluation management initiatives. These are now being documented and their story will become part of the available history of this movement.

Similar developments are also found at the local levels of government. New York City began to measure the work of its government agencies in the 1970s in the wake of fiscal crisis. The 1990 study of the Mayors Management Planning Reporting System showed that pervasively city agencies were announcing performance targets and reporting their achievement or non-achievement, annually, but not using these reported measures in agency management. Beginning in 1994, the New York City Police Department and later the Department of Corrections and the Parks Department, began to use outcome measures as an integral part of management. Some structural changes were also involved, but a key feature of the reform was the dramatic change in the use of performance data in the process of management. For each of these agencies the performance outcomes were truly remarkable: crime in all categories and in all geographic districts was dramatically reduced, safety into jails was dramatically improved, and the safety and cleanliness of parks were very substantially increased. There are lessons to be learned from these all these experiences. The goal of the paper is to use a comparative approach to highlight some of these lessons and to propose promising areas to develop more balanced performance management efforts within the context of the public management reform movement.