Performance measurement in the public sector: Strategies to cope with the risks of performance measurement

Abstract

Many public, professional organizations have introduced performance measurement systems in the belief that they will lead to a transparent organization, offering incentives for performance and able to account for its performance. These systems produce a large number of perverse effects, however. The article presents five successive strategies aimed at preventing these effects where possible: tolerating competing product definitions; banning a monopoly on interpreting production figures; limiting the functions of and forums for performance measurement; strategically limiting the products that can be subjected to performance measurement; and using a process perspective of performance in addition to a product perspective.