The Big Question for Performance Management: Why Do Managers Use Performance Information?

This article proposes that understanding public employee use of performance information is perhaps the most pressing challenge for scholarship on performance management. Governments have devoted extraordinary effort in creating performance data, wagering that it will be used to improve governance, but there is much we do not know about the factors associated with the use of that information. This article examines the antecedents of self-reported performance information use from a survey of local government managers. The results show that public service motivation, leadership role, information availability, organizational culture, and administrative flexibility all affect performance information use.