PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

Performance Appraisal

Table of Contents

Abstract3

Chapter 1: Introduction5

Background5

Chapter 2: Literature Review11

Performance Management in Multi-National Organizations11

Benchmarking25

The Quality Assurance System DIN ISO 9000-900431

Citizens' Charters34

Quality Awards37

From Benchmarking to Learning Strategies41

Chapter 3: Methodology54

Research Design54

Data Collection Method54

Keywords55

Reliability55

Validity55

Ethical Concerns56

Chapter 4: Results and Findings59

Chapter 5: Conclusion77

References81

Abstract

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder's interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch-drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)-driven experiences of systems development and failure.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Background

Performance is a key word permeating all discussion about “new public management” (OECD, 1993, p. 7). Part of its attraction is that performance is a broad concept: it has various meanings, for different audiences, in different contexts (Carter, 1991). This makes the design of performance indicators (PIs) in both the private and the public sectors very difficult. Besides the technical problem of operationalizing an abstract concept, the same set of PIs may need to be used to answer questions about the different dimensions of performance.

Whereas performance measurement in the private sector is, in general, seen as something normal - the assumption being that the private sector is imbued with a performance-based culture - conventional wisdom suggests that there are special characteristics of the public sector which make performance measurement inappropriate or, at least, very difficult. Two explanations are commonly used to explain the differences in public/private performance measurement (Carter, 1991). The first assumes that because private firms putatively adhere to bottom-line profit requirements, performance measurement is a straightforward and contestable technical procedure.

The second argument focuses on the particular social and political pressures on public sector agencies. Public services operate with a fixed budget and consumer groups are in competition with each other for scarce resources. The market solution to this situation is to introduce the user pays principle in selected public services so that users of a service are the actual people paying for that service. But the imperative of the welfare state precludes this market option from economic textbooks. This problem of scarce resources implies for performance measurement in the public sector that a certain degree of insensitivity to consumer demands is positively desirable in order ...