Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Managing an efficient and accountable government has long been a classical question in the Public Administration field and the ideas of the New Public Management have been widely accepted as to the solution since the 1980s. The core element of this reform is evaluating individual performance of the agency rather than as a whole, which grants greater autonomy to organizations involved in the implementation and often has them exposed to pressure for accountability through the market, rather than conventional political means (Peters, 2018:158). An assumption here is that it allows bureaucrats to be absolved from ‘red tape’ and structural inefficiency (Bozeman, 1993) and to make use of their discretion to achieving the goal.

This prevailing conviction on its managerial effect, however, has not been sufficiently substantiated in the empirical works (Jakobsen&Mortensen, 2016; Thiel&Leeuw, 2002). A number of studies examine what promotes the performance information use in the performance management, while they understate what impedes their effective use of performance information in terms of the institutional context in which the public managers are already placed (Kroll, 2015; Sanger, 2013; Moynihan&Pandey, 2010). Advocates of the performance management are negligent of the fact that embedded bureaucratic structure and administrative procedure could be as equivalent to another political means and inherently conflict with bureaucrats’ use of discretion and autonomy. In the aspect of goal displacement, this often leads to the compliance to the rules as an end in themselves rather than a means to accomplish the goals of the agency (Peters, 2018; Graeber, 2015), which simply increases an administrative burden (Herd&Moynihan, 2019)

In an attempt to uncover this downside of performance management, this study specifically investigates how institutional complexity and stringent oversight in the performance management practice negatively affect the internal use of performance information in the individual agency. By using the pooled cross-sectional survey data at the federal level, I argue the number and types of performance measures would affect their actual use of performance information. Also, the degree and types of external oversight are expected to affect their actual use of performance information. Drawing evidence from the perceptions of public managers expects to well-tackle how perceived institutional and political control engender administrative burden instead of promoting their internal competency.

This study contributes to identifying specific conditions under which performance management practice can or cannot obtain the intended effect. Freed from an absolute conviction on its effect, this disentangles to what extent the performance management both ensures and undermines the efficiency and accountability for the bureaucrats. This directly revisits the discussion on politics and administration dichotomy, indicative of unintended consequence when little discretion is given to bureaucrats. In conclusion, this paper sheds lights on the fact that inherent bureaucratic structure conflicts with the core principles of the performance management practice and this tension should be sufficiently considered in executing performance management.