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The Problems And Challenges Of Performance Management

Better Essays

Part 3 Empirical chapter
Discussion of the Problems and Challenges of performance management
Performance management mostly is not successful as expected in the public sector. According to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland (2005) a thematic inspection of performance management noted that though performance management was “substantially developed”, a long way is still needed to go before everyone was responsible for providing a good service and “many areas of performance management in the early stages of implementation existed as well”. There are many implementation reasons causing these problems, for instance, the reduction of government spending (Gianakis, 2002), or purely a tool for management rather than a tool for …show more content…

Technical problems refers to the indicators and the data, information collection, interpretation and analysis. They are preponderantly difficult problems (Pollanen, 2005; Adcroft and Willis, 2005) and especially in terms of data quality (Black et al., 2001), the choice of indicators (Black et al., 2001; Bevan and Hood, 2006; Carvalho et al., 2006), validation (Evans, 2004; Carlin, 2004), reporting (Pollanen, 2005; Adcroft and Willis, 2005) and usage and interpretation (Neely et al., 1995; Wilcox and Bourne, 2003). Nevertheless, organisations are focusing on improving the technical problems of their indicators (Pollitt, 2005). Secondly, systems problems are related to the “bigger picture” issues, i.e. integrating performance systems into the original systems (Gianakis, 2002), a lack of strategic view which encourages short-term thinking (Neely et al., 1995), the ambiguity of performance objectives (Pollanen, 2005), sub-optimisation (Neely et al., 1995; Pollitt, 2000; Gianakis, 2002; Adcroft and Willis, 2005) and the cost of performance management (Train and Williams, 2000; Holzer and Yang, 2004; Pollanen, 2005). The third kind of problem are the significant people issues and their involvement inside the PM system among inter multiple stakeholders (Black et al., 2001; Wang and Berman, 2001; Gianakis, 2002; McAdam et al., 2005). These issues can be caused by a

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