How Managerial Performance Data Use Engages State Level Bureaucrats

• In Event: Performance Management and Performance Information

Abstract

Performance management techniques promise to improve public services, but it has struggled to engage frontline employees with the professional expertise to make sense of and learn from performance metrics. The literature on performance management has focused largely on managerial uses of performance data, while little attention has been given to the role of frontline employees, and the connection between managerial uses and employee engagement. We offer two contributions, using a mixed-method analysis of a performance management reform in Danish hospitals. We rely surveys from both managers and employees. The key advantage of our analysis over standard survey-based assessments of performance management is that our independent and dependent variables comes from different surveys,, avoiding common source bias.

First, we show that managerial use of performance data for learning and improvement, rewarding, accountability dialogue and resource advocacy matters to how employees engage in goal-based learning. Second, while others have suggested that how managers make use of performance matters, we provide evidence of this, showing that managerial performance information use for learning and improvement affects employee engagement in goal-based learning positively while use for reward management and resource advocacy affects it negatively.

Authors

• Donald P. Moynihan, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Martin Baekgaard, Aarhus University