Performance Management System Design and Implementation in Police Agencies: Is Following Recommended Practices Worth It?

As interest in and concerns about performance management systems continue to grow, scholars have increasingly suggested methods to better design and implement these systems in the public sector organizations, with the underlying assumption that they will help public organizations perform better. These suggestions include approaches to design and implement performance management activities, including target selection, indicator adoption, data collection and analysis, and reporting of results. These recommendations are available in the form of books and research articles that cover a wide variety of performance management systems and their respective usage settings. Scholars argue that by using their recommendations (termed as “recommended practices” from here onwards) in designing and implementing performance management systems, system designers and managers can improve organizational performance; a claim I intend to examine in this paper. There are scores of recommended practices spread out in the literature, which not only lack theoretical foundations, but also might be contradictory to each other. The results from this study suggest do not suggest a link between the recommended practices and police performance, as only the practices of using performance information and providing discretion to officers were found to be supporting the hypotheses for only one out of the eight crime categories. These two significant results might be attributed to chance alone. The results, hence, raise questions about the effectiveness of the recommended practices in improving organizational performance. Justification of the use of recommended practices, however, can still be traced to goal-setting theory