Expectations for performance management systems continue to grow in the public sector. Yet few administrators know how to effectively implement and sustain these systems. Performance-Based Management Systems: Effective Implementation and Maintenance supports practical efforts to build and maintain performance management systems in public organizations, explaining obstacles to measurement efforts and providing guidance on how to overcome them. The book begins by exploring performance measurement as a key element of performance-based management systems. It discusses its legacy and its limitations and offers competing explanations of the factors that constrain its effective use. Next, it focuses on building theory in support of practice through a mixed methods approach. It examines research reconciling the conflicting explanations for the lack of proper use of performance measurement information. Then it offers new insights for developing a context-sensitive model of performance measurement that can lead to effective practices. The third part develops these insights into a pragmatic model of performance-based management. It provides a realistic explanation of the contributions of performance measurement and gives advice derived from current practice. The author concludes by highlighting the rationale, methods, and findings of two studies that served as the foundation for this book. She also provides final suggestions of how to move practice and theory forward. This volume explains why performance measurement is not more widely used in the public sector, and explores how implementation of performance measurement can be improved with insights gained from extant literature on public policy, organizational politics and culture, and knowledge utilization. Mastery of this material will enable practitioners to understand how to effectively implement policies that will positively impact their organizations and their employees.

Everyday first-line managers and supervisors struggle with deficiencies and inequities in their organization, their leadership, and their people. Performance-Based Management recognizes that deficiencies exist and focuses on those things that first-line managers and supervisors can do to be more effective. It helps managers not only understand what people require to be effective in the workplace, it provides them with tools to assess organizational factors, identify barriers to performance, and convene and direct the appropriate resources to improve workplace performance. Written by Judith Hale—author of the best-selling Performance Consultant's Fieldbook—Performance-Based Management comprehensively addresses the role of Performance and Management Information, Communication, and Performance Support Systems Measures and Feedback Rewards and Consequences Performance Support Tools and Resources Internal and External Consultants Power and Politics Message and Image Management

Since the 1980s, the public sector has been undergoing major changes throughout the Western industrialized world, the transitional economies of central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. The main thrust of these changes has been to bring public sector management practices closer to those of the private sector. This raises the question of how far public and private sector management are comparable. This set examines the relationships between public sector and private sector management in terms of both classical management theory and the new public management that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. While the collection concentrates on articles from the last 20 years, some historical pieces are also included. The four volumes are arranged along the following lines: volume 1 - for and against the public sector; volume 2 - managing the plural state; volume 3 - broadening the public management perspective; and volume 4 - from policy to practice in public services.

Public administration as an American profession originated in the early twentieth century with urban reformers advocating the application of scientific and business practices to rehabilitate corrupt city governments. That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management movement promotes entrepreneurs over civil servants, performance over process, decentralization over centralization, and flexibility over rules. John Rohr demurs, arguing that the movement goes too far in downplaying the distinctively American challenges arising from the separated powers principle. Consequently, the NPM alienates public management from its natural home—a nation-state established within a constitutional order. According to Rohr, "nothing is more fundamental to governance than a constitution; and therefore to stress the constitutional character of administration is to establish the proper role of administration as governance that includes management but transcends it as well." This is not a novel argument for Rohr, who was recognized in 1999 by the Louis Brownlow Committee of the National Academy of Public Administration for his lifetime contributions on the "constitutional underpinnings" of public administration. But this new version of his rule-of-law critique directly addresses the NPM's excesses, framed convincingly as a comparative study of cases found in four countries spanning three centuries. As a result, Rohr establishes that the constitutional-administrative nexus is intimate, stable, pervasive, and enduring. The first half of the book examines the linkages between constitutions and administrations in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, all of them sufficiently similar to the United States to make comparisons meaningful and sufficiently different to provide illuminating perspectives on domestic practices. The examples extend from the French Revolution through the founding of the Canadian Confederation in the 1860s to such contemporary issues as the influence of administrative directives from Brussels on the British courts. The second half of the book examines American cases in three categories: separation of powers, individual rights, and federalism. In each case Rohr highlights instances of public management "with all its warts and wrinkles tending to the mundane details of translating great constitutional principles into everyday actions." American administrative law, Rohr concludes, has structured safeguards to protect the integrity of administrative decision-making while also holding it accountable. Constitutional law has helped establish civil servants' freedom of speech and applied the fundamental principles of federalism to the administrative process. He summarizes his findings from the case studies by saying that the constitutional role of American civil servants comes not only from specific American experiences but also from the very nature of civil service.