Discussion of lessons from public management studies to general study of strategy

1. Performance Regimes:
Insights for Strategy
Donald Moynihan
Vancouver

2. Conventional view
• Performance measurement
– part of strategic management;
– how we know if goals are achieved
• Formulation lends itself to managerial
questions
• Contributions on design questions

3. Design example: Managerial autonomy
and investments in expertise
• Basic claim: autonomy increases incentive to
invest in performance expertise
• Experimental test from Denmark: some school
principals given more autonomy on hiring
than others (Calmar Andersen & Moynihan
2015)
• Those granted more autonomy more likely to
download performance data seven months
later

5. Broader view
• Performance regimes
– a fundamental change in nature of governance
– tied to politics
• Opens a broader set of questions, links
management to political science

6. Politics
• Performance data is socially constructed –
depends on power, position, preferences
(Moynihan 2008)

7. Partisanship: as power
• Ideological distance affects how performance
data is used:
– Agencies defined as liberal tended to receive
lower performance scores, more scrutiny, more
improvement plans than conservative peers
(Lavertu, Lewis & Moynihan 2013)

8. Motivated reasoning:
When ideology becomes a bias
• Conservative elected officials more likely to
believe in logic of personalized responsibility
• Criticism of performance data by liberal
advocate:
– weakened its use by liberals, but increased use by
conservatives (Nielsen and Moynihan 2015)

9. How public views information
• Perception of performance data depends on
ideology
– Same performance data understood by
conservatives and liberals differently when told
institution was public/private (Bækgaard and
Serritzlew 2015)

10. Thanks
Welcome your feedback and questions
dmoynihan@lafollette.wisc.edu
@donmoyn

11. References
• Calmar Andersen, Simon and Donald Moynihan. 2015. Bureaucratic
Investments in Expertise: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled
http://bit.ly/1L45Eax
• Lavertu, Stephane, David Lewis and Donald P. Moynihan. 2013.
“Administrative Reform, Ideology, and Bureaucratic Effort: Performance
Management in the Bush Era.” Public Administration Review 73(6): 845-
856. http://bit.ly/1AFfgVU
• Moynihan, Donald. 2008. The Dynamics of Performance Management:
Constructing Information and Reform. Georgetown University Press.
• Martin Baekgaard and Søren Serritzlew. 2015. Interpreting Performance
Information: Motivating Reasoning or Unbiased Comprehension
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.12406/abstract
• Nielsen, Poual Aees and Donald Moynihan. 2015b. Biases and Governing:
Experimental Evidence from Elected Officials Use of Performance Data.
Paper presented at 2015 Public Management Research Conference.