This paper looks at the contextual, organizational and person related antecedents of public managers’ reported use of performance information. A distinction is made between internal and external use of performance information. We are especially interested how  the top officials’ role identity  help to explain performance information use, by linking current research on performance information use with that on identity theories, which has been described as a promising and increasingly fertile interaction of public management research and organization theory (Ashworth et al. 2014). The paper uses data from a large scale executive survey with answers from 3,154 top public sector officials in 17 European countries. Seemingly unrelated regression is used to analyse the data and test a set of hypotheses on the antecedents of performance information use. We confirm previously found positive relationships between contextual factors such as goal clarity and task complexity/networking and performance information use. We also find a significantly higher use of performance information in agencies and large organizations whereas socio-demographic variables generally have a lower impact. Higher educated executives tend to use PI to a lesser degree and while public sector tenure doesn’t impact performance information use, previous private sector experience has a strong positive impact. In terms of role identity, we find that top officials with a managerial identity show a significantly higher internal use of performance information whereas top officials who see themselves as networkers and facilitators make more external use of performance information. A bureaucratic role identity in contrast does not have a significant impact on the degree of performance information use.