Contrasting and explaining purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information: a mayor’s perspective

ABSTRACT

This study looks at purposeful and legitimizing types of performance information use in local governments. Drawing on a survey of Austrian mayors who are at the politico-administrative apex of local government, the paper shows that purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information coexist, but they appear to be negatively associated. In exploring the contextual and organizational conditions under which legitimizing uses prevail over purposeful ones, the analysis shows that oversight (coercive) and political (normative) pressures, hierarchical culture, and low-performance information availability foster the dominance of the legitimizing use type over the purposeful one.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance information use
• local government
• purposeful use
• legitimizing use
• mayor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This figure represents the total number of local governments at the time of the survey. Due to mergers of local governments in some of the nine Länder in the recent past, there are currently 2,100 local governments in Austria. The mergers did not result in changes to the ratio of small and medium sized governments.

2. Statistics Austria 2018. Based on the EUROSTAT classification ‘degree of urbanisation’ which creates a classification of all LAU2s (Local Administrative Units – Level 2/municipalities) into the following three categories: cities/urban centres (densely populated areas) (Code 1), towns and suburbs (intermediate density areas) (Code 2), rural areas (thinly populated areas) (Code 3).

3. The values are acceptable given the small number of items of this scale (Cortina 1993, Murphy and Davidsholder, 1988, p. 89).

4. Absolute difference approaches assume that the direction of asymmetry does not matter (e.g., a local government with legitimizing performance information use = 5 and managerial performance information use = 3 has the same dominance score as a local government with legitimizing performance information use = 3 and managerial performance information use = 5), and prevents to analyse if the imbalance in on direction is more detrimental or in our case is associated with opposite but interconnected explanations.

5. Separate regressions for legitimizing and purposeful performance information uses are also shown in Appendix D.

6. We are indebted to one of the reviewers for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank [16005].

Notes on contributors

Sanja Korac

Sanja Korac is Assistant Professor in Public, Nonprofit & Health Management. Her research interests include motivation and leadership in the public sector, performance measurement and management, public sector accounting and financial management, financial and administrative resilience, and innovative forms of public service delivery. She is part of several international research networks and active member of IRSPM.

Iris Saliterer

Iris Saliterer is Professor of Public and Non-Profit Management at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg and was Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University in 2015/2016. Her main research interests are performance management, public innovation and public service motivation. She has been awarded major national research grants, has conducted several international collaborative research projects, and actively fosters engagement with practice.

Mariafrancesca Sicilia

Mariafrancesca Sicilia is Associate Professor at Bergamo University in Italy and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise (PuLSE) at The Open University in UK. Her research covers public sector budgeting, accounting, accountability, performance measurement and management and models of public services delivery, such as coproduction of public services. She has carried out research for Italian central government departments, local governments and other public bodies. She has published in journals such as Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Public Administration, Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, Public Money and Management

Ileana Steccolini

Ileana Steccolini is Professor of Accounting and Finance, the Director of Research and PhD coordinator at Newcastle University London. She is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT, Melbourne and a Fellow, Queen’s Centre for Not-for-profit Research, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. She is the founder of the Accounting and Accountability Special Interest Group within the International Research Society of Public Management, a member of the Standing Scientific Committee of the European Accounting Association and of the IRSPM board, and a member of the International Faculty Board of CIPFA. She is an associate editor of Financial Accountability and Management and of Health Services Management Research, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, and Public Administration Review.