Towards performance culture via learning culture: lessons from Poland

To enable the public administration the effective realisation of public tasks in dynamically changing, contemporary reality it was necessary to replace the traditional methods of administrating by the New Public Management and New Governance instruments. At the beginning of this century the Polish Ministry of Finance (MF) has begun to implement these tools, including performance budgeting (PB) aiming at increasing of the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending. MF improves their methods and strategies, thus it is a learning organization as evidenced by the numerous documents prepared by MF. To identify the learning disabilities in PB implementation process in Poland, we use the non-reactive research method based on the analyses of the content and the evolution of documents issued by Ministry of Finances covering the period 2005-2014 and we analyse the publications evaluating PB implementation in Poland, including the reports of the Polish Court of Auditors, as well. The research problem is the answer to the question: in which way learning disabilities in the performance budget implementation process make the effective implementation of the performance budgeting in the Polish government sector more difficult from the perspective of the Senge’s theory of learning organization. The aim of the paper is to indicate the way to improve the performance budgeting implementation process. We conclude that even if the new concepts require the transformation of the public administration unit into more adaptive learning organizations, the appropriate learning methods and strategies were not sufficiently implemented in MF. Therefore, it was possible to achieved the main objective of PB only to a limited extent