The adoption of performance management systems in government agencies : challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The thesis explores the problems of implementation and development of Performance management systems (PMS), which have become one of the chief solutions to increase accountability and efficiency of government agencies. Captured stakeholder’s demands have made incumbent global governments to consider adopting these systems to obtain better results. PMS implementation in government agencies: The studies fulfil the research objectives as they cover a variety of case studies and advance relevant literature. Performance management systems are implemented with the purpose of assessing and increasing the levels of performance of public services. They include formulation of goals, operations through performance indicators and the goals formed to be the guide when making decisions. In the public sector, PMS are viewed as means for increasing accountability or for ensuring predetermined goals and efficient usage of resources in the government agencies. In the case of its application in government agencies the following are some of the main challenges: The culture in organizations is one of the biggest barriers since change initiates a process of disrupting the norm. A common challenge of adopting new systems in the public sector organizations is that they already have standard processes in place, and are typically bureaucratic in nature. This resistance is often in form of fear of the enhanced probabilities of being challenged and held responsible for one’s actions as well as apprehension of job losses and shift in power balance. However, the implementation of PMS may be constrained by the unavailability of resources such as finance, people and technology. A major challenge that government agencies have is a small budget that they work with, this greatly hinders them from acquiring the best tools and training that can help in performance management.