The Performance Paradox in the Public Sector

By S. van Thiel, Frans Leeuw. 2002

829 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Administrative reform has led to a strong increase in the use of performance assessment instruments in the public sector. However, this has also led to several unintended consequences, such as the performance paradox, tunnel vision, and “analysis paralysis.” These unintended consequences can reduce the quality of the knowledge about actual levels of performance or even negatively affect performance. Examples can be found in all policy sectors. The authors argue that certain characteristics of the public sector–such as ambiguous policy objectives, discretionary authority of street–level bureaucrats, simultaneous production and consumption of services, and the disjunction of costs and revenues–increase the risk of a performance paradox, either unintentionally or deliberately. Performance assessment should therefore take the special characteristics of the public sector into account and develop systems that can handle contested and multiple performance indicators, striking a balance in the degree of “measure pressure” and minimizing dysfunctional effects.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Public Administration, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75e93862765958974146da10dc0c801c9a3a7089

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Citations in the corpus

Organizational Control Systems and Pay-for-Performance in the Public Service (2013, background): “One step further goes ‘cream skimming’ and ‘gaming the system’ (van Thiel & Leeuw, 2002).”
Performance-Based Funding in American Higher Education: A Systematic Synthesis of the Intended and Unintended Consequences (2020, background): “With this context in mind, public organizations often attempt to meet the performance metrics while changing their priorities as little as possible, which eventually results in the measured metrics being weakly correlated with overall performance (Courty & Marschke, 2008; van Thiel & Leeuw, 2002).”
THE USE OF PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: EFFECTS ON PERFORMANCE (2014, background): “This study is one of the first larger scale empirical studies to provide evidence on the determinants and effects of the use of performance measurement systems in public sector organizations (cf. Van Helden, 2005).”
Constitutive Effects of Performance Indicators: Getting beyond unintended consequences (2014, background): “When measure fixation (Smith, 1995) follows indicators with low validity, the conditions are present for a performance paradox (van Thiel and Leeuw, 2002), i.e. a situation where measurement of quality is poorly related to quality itself.”
Challenges and Lessons in Implementing Results-Based Management (2007, background): “Meyer and Gupta (1994), Smith (1995), Perrin (1998), Wholey (1999), van Thiel and Leeuw (2002), Bouckaert and Peters (2002), Feller (2002) and Thomas (2005) are some of the authors who discuss specifi c challenges and pitfalls in resultsbased management.”
Decentralization (2012, background): “The same increased specification of the indicator, however, enables the decentralized actor to concentrate his efforts on a more limited policy goal, circumscribed by the rewarded aspects of performance while ignoring the nonmeasured aspects of performance (Van Thiel & Leeuw, 2002).”
An Examination of the (Un)Intended Consequences of Performance Funding in Higher Education (2017, background): “However, performance management policies have been found to create a “performance paradox” resulting in unintended consequences (van Thiel & Leeuw, 2002).”