PA performance shall not live by results alone

For decades, common wisdom in Italy held that to improve the ability of the PA to satisfy the needs of citizens and businesses alike, mechanisms and tools to incentivize employee behavior that could be defined along the lines of delivering outputs.  But this approach synthesized a degree of complexity that was, in actual fact, far more extensive. In any case, in applying this cultural model, no small number of criticalities surfaced: the emphasis on internal efficiency and effectiveness didn’t always actually translate into higher quality service provision for people.

These uncertain outcomes beg the question: What is the connection between organizational culture and the public value generated by the PA? The undeniable complexity of real-life situations makes them nearly impossible to condense into standard frameworks, which gives rise to the need to consider the multifaceted nature of the cultures that permeate public organizations. The solution, therefore, lies in a question that is far from simple to answer: What organizational sub-cultures can best support the PA in achieving superlative performance?

We set out to take a deep dive into how and how much different organizational subcultures shape employees’ perceptions of the performance of the organizational department where they work.  To do so, we administered a questionnaire to the PA personnel in a medium-sized Italian town.

Our analysis focused on these four prevailing models:

• The rules subculture revolves around respecting codified work procedures and protocols.
• The results subculture is based on productivity and achieving goals.
• The innovation subculture is dedicated to new ideas, growth, and a propensity for risk taking.
• The group subculture centers on building relationships grounded in trust among the members of work groups, prioritizing collaborating and listening to one another.

Our findings show that, as expected, the rules subculture has no appreciable effects on performance, as perceived by PA employees. In fact, the traditional bureaucratic model, focusing as it does on standard procedures and the status quo, is ill-suited to respond to the continual changes that public services are currently subject to (growing expectations, exogenic shocks, unpredictable circumstances and the like). Likewise, even where a results subculture prevails, no improvements in perceived performance levels are observed. It’s been years since New Public Management was introduced in Italy, with its exclusive emphasis on performance, revolving around value creation mechanisms primarily inside the organization. Yet this approach does not appear to be wholly compatible with the necessity of constantly adapting to the dynamics impacting public service provision. Indeed, today more than ever before, the PA is expected to be open, accessible, and willing to listen to the needs of external service users.

In contrast, both the innovation subculture and the group subculture are associated with higher levels of perceived performance. This thanks to an alignment mechanism for the benchmark values set down by organizations and those expressed by employees. The group subculture can be explained, at least in part, by individuals’ sense of belonging to their organization (engagement). In other words, if we look at the ability to attain higher levels of public performance, innovation and group subcultures do better than rules and results subcultures, presumably implying a connection with the active engagement of personnel in the overall vision of the public body.

Our findings seem to suggest that the “results above all else” narrative doesn’t fully capture the specificities of the Public Administration. The reality is that the PA pursues objectives that are so varied as to actually be conflicting in some cases, and for a highly heterogeneous set of target users. In the face of such complexity, by using traditional approaches to incentivization alone to influence employee behaviors, PAs run the risk of underevaluing the true meaning of performance in the public sphere and narrowing its focus.

Clearly, this doesn’t mean underestimating the need to concentrate on results and work to quantify them. Quite the contrary. The provocative title we chose serves to underscore the urgency of not only consolidating performance-based management approaches, but expanding their horizons.  What we mean by this is that relationships and sharing mechanisms around organizational objectives are so vital (in particular in contexts in which people are the main factor of production), we need to rethink the assumptions that have traditionally justified the introduction of performance management in the public arena. This calls for continually questioning the true effectiveness of the tools that are deployed in relation to the purposes they are meant to serve. We may discover that public performance does not live by results alone, or even that different cultures can drive organizations to achieve better results.

Giorgio Giacomelli, Marta Micacchi, Lorenza Micacchi, “Performance shall not live by results alone: organizational subcultures and perceived performance in public administration,” Public Money & Management, 44(6), 500–514. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2023.2295366.