Performance Management in Local Government: Is Practice Influenced by Doctrine?

ABSTRACT

Successful performance management is presumed to be dependent on several practices and organizational conditions prescribed in performance management doctrine, including the presence of sound performance measures, a clear sense of goals and objectives, devolved decision authority, engaged executives, and incentives and sanctions tied to performance. Their presence, according to doctrine, is necessary for performance management to function properly. The authors of this study examine the presence of these prescribed practices and conditions in 66 U.S. cities and counties that have been recognized for their performance management efforts, and in a subset of these governments perceived by the authors as more fully engaged in performance management than others in the set. They find considerable evidence of doctrine’s influence on the adoption of some practices, but much less on others. Variation in reported benefits among the performance management reputational leaders provides evidence in support of the efficacy of some of these prescribed practices individually and hints at the efficacy of the set of practices in combination.

KEYWORDS::

• decision authority
• incentives
• executive engagement
• performance management

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Jordan Jones and Ellen Liston in helping to develop the data set on which this study is based.

Notes

When Sanger (2013) ranked 190 cities according to the quality and sophistication of performance measurement, she expected to find a relationship with city size, income, and the presence of a professional manager. She found none of these relationships to be statistically significant.

The success of the New York City Police Department’s celebrated CompStat system was attributed in part to decentralized decision authority at the precinct level (Smith & Bratton, 2001, p. 459).

In Behn’s (2002, p. 7) assessment, “Performance management has not swept the world: it lives more in rhetoric than reality.”

The officials contacted were often named as contacts or information sources on websites or in materials describing their local government’s performance management program. Frequently, they were located in the office of the chief executive (e.g., mayor, city manager, county executive, county manager), the budget office, or the finance department.

These figures combine the percentages of respondents reporting their government to be tracking the indicated types of measures for “many” programs and for “all” programs.

Additional information

David N. Ammons is Albert Coates Professor of Public Administration and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Municipal Benchmarks: Assessing Local Performance and Establishing Community Standards (M.E. Sharpe, 2012) and Tools for Decision Making: A Practical Guide for Local Government (CQ Press, 2009) and editor of Leading Performance Management in Local Government (ICMA, 2008). His research areas include local government management, performance measurement and management, and benchmarking.

Dale J. Roenigk is the director of the North Carolina Local Government Performance Measurement Project and a faculty member at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of an annual benchmarking report on municipal services published by the School of Government. His research interests include benchmarking, performance measurement and management, and evaluation.