Interest in performance management has never been higher. But what does actual research on this topic tell us about the effects of performance management, reform efforts and governance more generally? Historically, the answer often seemed to be that such reforms did not work very well. This...

While governance increasingly relies on performance regimes, we have relatively limited empirical knowledge of the full effects of these regimes. This article presents a roughly drawn map of such effects, identifying relevant variables and speculating how they interact with performance measures,...

This paper offers empirical evidence on a specific question: how does leadership foster the use of performance data? More broadly, it informs the ways in which we understand how leadership can influence the implementation of management reforms. Previous research suggests that leadership matters...

One of the “big questions” facing public management research centers on the use of performance data. 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 why managers actually...

This paper examines the performance management practices of the George W. Bush administration, including the President's Management Agenda, the Program Assessment Rating Tool, and efforts to link performance data to the budget process. Such efforts have struggled to succeed. Congress has...

This paper examines how public management reforms that foster market values (through performance measurement, financial incentives and contracting out) crowd-out the public service motivation of employees. The flaws of the market model in practice means that it encourages opportunistic behavior,...

This document presents the views of the participants of a two day workshop discussing the future of red tape research. To the greatest extent possible, the authors have tried to accurately represent the consensus view that emerged. But as is in any discourse of a moderately large number of...

Presidents are claimed to have a stronger interest in an effective bureaucracy than Congress, because they must be responsive to the public as a whole rather than narrow interests. We examine this claim in the context of multiple waves of US performance management reforms: the Government...

A good deal of research has demonstrated how public service motivation (PSM) facilitates desirable organizational attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work effort. Other research has demonstrated that PSM predicts higher levels of social capital and...

Public services are delivered less and less through single hierarchical organizations, and more and more through networks of multiple organizations that can come from any level of government, as well as from the private and nonprofit sectors. Networks provide governments with the flexibility to...