Article Performance Management Purpose, Executive Engagement, and Reported Benefits among Leading Local Governments

The authors of this article examine a pair of organizational factors for their contributions to the levels of performance management success among a set of seventy-two U.S. local governments, all of which enjoy reputations for good performance management. The factors examined are, first, the purpose accorded to performance management in each organization and, second, the engagement of senior managers in reviewing the performance of operating units. The authors find that local governments that regard performance management to be their management philosophy perceive greater benefits on particular dimensions of performance than those regarding it to be a system or simply a means of upgrading performance measurement. Greater benefits are also reported by organizations whose executives routinely review the performance of operating units. Keywords performance management, performance measurement, management philosophy, performance man-agement system, local government, executive engagement, senior managers The practice of performance management— that is, the actual use of performance informa-tion to guide management decisions and to improve operations and services—is far less prevalent among U.S. local governments than the now widespread practice of collecting and reporting performance measures (de Lancer Julnes and Holzer 2001; Behn 2002; Sanger 2008, 2013). Although many city and county governments claim to practice performance management, largely on the strength of their measurement efforts, the evidence suggests that most venture little beyond the reporting of mea-sures. When the Government Performance Project examined seventy-five large U.S. cities and counties a decade ago, only eight earned a