What drives the use of performance measurement (PM) systems in the public sector? And what are the effects of PM use? In a recent study in Financial Accountability & Management (Van der Kolk, 2022, open access), I address these questions. In this blog, I highlight seven observations from the review.
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Recently, my paper “Performance measurement in the public sector: Mapping 20 years of survey research” was published in Financial Accountability and Management, a scientific journal dedicated to study management practices in governments, charities and public services.
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The omnipresence of smiley evaluations, rankings, scores, key performance indicators and school grades hardly surprise us anymore. We take their presence and value for granted. But these quantified measures of performance come at a cost, I argue in a recent commentary in Business & Society.
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I am honored (and still a bit overwhelmed) by the decision of Thinkers50 to include me in the Thinkers50 RADAR 2020. Continue reading
The journal Public Money & Management (PMM) has both an academic and a practitioner readership, and called for contributions to a special issue about developing civil servants. A brief note on motivating civil servants that I submitted was published online this week.
This week, our study of the use of performance measurement in hospitals was published in Health Care Management Review – and the best part: it’s open access!
In an effort to not become an “ivory tower academic“, I accepted the invitation from Follow The Money (a Dutch platform for investigative journalism) to start writing some brief articles. In these articles, I focus on issues related to management, accounting, behavior and ethics, and try to communicate research findings from the fields of management, accounting and business ethics to a wider audience.
Yesterday, 15 January, the findings from our study on management and motivation in the public sector featured on the Dutch national news radio BNR.
(This article was also published on IE Business School’s corporate relations page IE Insights.)
Can performance measurement systems negatively impact performance? A recent study (“Performance measurement, cognitive dissonance and coping strategies: exploring individual responses to NPM-inspired output control”) suggests this, finding that employee behavior can change when performance is being measured. When subjected to such scrutiny, professionals sometimes rather focus on easily measurable tasks, while avoiding activities that are not measured or do that do not yield results in the short term. And that may harm the (long-term) performance of professionals and organizations.
Based on my doctoral dissertation I recorded a 59 second video, summarizing the findings of one of the chapters.
Berend van der Kolk 