A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS The Cases of Sicily and North Carolina

There has been a conscious movement around the world toward accountability and transparency in public organizations over the last twenty years, beginning with the New Public Management (NPM) movement of the early 1990s. This movement has produced countless formal structures on the design and implementation of performance management systems, covering not only the quantification of achieved outcomes but also the possibility to empower decision-makers to understand their operating environments and to evaluate results. While the design and implementation features of performance management are tailored to meet the specific needs of each public organization, most systems function around the three major subsystems of planning, performance, and evaluation. Public organizations, at all levels of government, have made progress on using performance management systems to capture the underlying complexities of accountability and transparency; however, research and practice have shown that performance management is still maturing as an effective organizational approach in the public sector, concluding that performance remains the mainstream focus of international public management research and that the limitations of existing models must be addressed (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2008). Therefore, we need additional insights on the key factors of the underlying conditions that create successful performance management systems in the public sector. The goal of our research is to contribute toward the maturity process of performance management in regional governments, drawing conclusions primarily from the strengths and limitations of existing models. We begin with a literature review on comparative performance management research before justifying our comparative case study analysis between the regional governments of Sicily and North Carolina\u2014a level of government that has been largely overlooked in the literature. After presenting the cases, we discuss our findings from the comparative case study analysis in hope that other regional governments can use them for maturing their systems as an effective organizational approach to performance management.Performance management is maturing as an effective organizational approach in public organizations around the world, but the existing models have limitations that must be addressed. The international comparative case study analysis in this article presents policy recommendations and organizational strategies on how regional governments can create more robust performance management systems for higher levels of accountability and transparency in a time of global economic crisis. These include the consideration of organizational structure regarding alignment, control, and culture, the positive impact of performance management legislation, the role of executive leadership, and the need for an informational infrastructure that supports performance management