Conference Agenda

Evidence about the positive effect of performance management systems in public organizations is well documented (see Gerrish, 2016). Several theoretical frameworks have contributed to simplifying collaborative performance management. The possibility of visualizing different performance dimensions (e.g., efficiency, equity) and units of analysis (e.g., collaboration, organization) frames the debate about contradictions between various sectors and levels (see Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015). However, how to incorporate performance information to manage cross-sector, multi-level collaborations is an ongoing inquiry. Information asymmetry between stakeholders is a core hurdle for using performance information in collaborative performance management (see Berg et al., 2019). This study seeks to answer whether the public sector can reduce information asymmetry by holding corporations accountable not only for their business practices but also for the actions of their suppliers.

Based on the case of the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (SCDDA), this study analyzes how German corporations reacted to the legal obligation to report compliance with environmental and human rights legislation across their global supply chains. Using the first mandatory reports of German corporations with more than 3,000 employees in 2024, the study tests whether there is a paradigm shift in the use of performance information towards a collaborative performance management system. While the process to move corporate accountability from voluntary to mandatory bases is not straightforward (see Weihrauch et al., 2023), the implications of such a policy innovation need further study. Preliminary findings reveal that corporate accountability and the use of performance information have not changed, as most big corporations have used the same organizational routines when corporations were not legally accountable for environmental and human rights violations in their supply chains.

Social aims of sustainability affect all the different actors in society. Municipalities play an important role in promoting sustainability. Although sustainability has been studied extensively in many disciplines, there has been relatively little public administration research from the managerial viewpoint on sustainability. As sustainability is much studied in accounting with a specific focus on reporting, we focus on less studied topic of the use of sustainability information in management.

As commonly known sustainability has different dimensions that can and often do conflict with each other. In this study, our focus is on social and financial sustainability in local government. This, socio-financial sustainability can also be viewed as a traditional public management dilemma: how to use limited resources so that as much sustainable impacts as possible are created. We view socio-financial sustainability as a performance goal in local government and consider management of socio-financial sustainability from the perspective of performance dialogue (Laihonen & Mäntylä, 2017; Laihonen & Rajala, 2020).

While performance management can be approached as a social process of including more people to management practices (Agostino & Arnaboldi, 2018; Moynihan, 2005; 2008), performance dialogue takes steps further. The performance dialogue enables collaborative knowledge formation process (Laihonen et al., 2024) where participants jointly interpret performance information, discuss it and recognize actions needed to manage performance (Rajala et al., 2018). Socio-financial sustainability sets a new goal for performance management in local government, where different values, goals and limited resources are contemplated to create impacts for citizen wellbeing and society.

In this study, we aim to understand the role and practices of performance dialogue in the context of managing socio-financial sustainability. Specifically, we ask, what are the individual capacities and organizational capabilities enabling knowledge-based performance dialogue in the management of socio-financial sustainability (RQ).

Our qualitative approach utilizes diverse empirical data. The research is a part of the TieDi research project funded by the Occupational Safety and Health Fund and the Universities of Tampere and Eastern Finland. The research project involves the Finnish cities of Kangasala and Hämeenlinna where the interview data has been collected from the top management and senior office-holders. The data also includes survey responses of the primary education and early childhood education managers and experts involved in the project's workshops, as well as observational data and other materials from the workshops. We apply content analysis to identify the critical capacities and capabilities for performance dialogue.

Based on our preliminary results, performance dialogue seems to be a multidimensional phenomenon in socio-financial sustainability management. It is associated with interaction between individuals. However, performance dialogue is also a function of management, where the goal is to create a common understanding of the reconciliation of social and financial sustainability in the public. Performance dialogue requires not only an adequate knowledge base, but also practices of knowledge utilization. Performance dialogue can be a significant means of reconciling different goals of sustainability in municipal management. Based on our data, performance dialogue requires knowledge management strategies and structures that support knowledge use and interaction.

References:

Agostino, D. & Arnaboldi, M. (2018), “Performance measurement systems in public service networks. The what, who and how of control”, Financial Accountability & Management, 34(2), 103-116.

Laihonen, H., Kork, A-A. & Sinervo, L-M. (2023), “Advancing Public Sector Knowledge Management: Towards an Understanding of Knowledge Formation in Public Administration”, Knowledge Management Research & Practice. DOI: 10.1080/14778238.2023.2187719.

Laihonen, H. & Mäntylä, S. (2017), “Principles of performance dialogue in public administration”, International Journal of Public Sector Management, 30(5), 414-428.

Laihonen H. & Rajala T. (2020), “Developing Public Administration with Performance Dialogues”, In: Farazmand A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham.

Moynihan, D. (2005), “Goal-based learning and the future of performance management”, Public Administration Review, 65(2), 203–216.

Moynihan, D. (2008). The dynamics of performance management: Constructing information and reform. Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press.

Rajala, T.; Laihonen, H. & Haapala, P. (2018), “Why is dialogue on performance challenging in the public sector?”, Measuring Business Excellence, 22(2), 117-129.

Collaborations between public, private, and community organizations arise out of the need to address complex societal problems in innovative ways. Collaborations usually need to adapt their strategy and operations as they gain more understanding of the problem and potential solutions, requiring continuing collective learning (Gerlak & Heikkila 2011). Various scholars have emphasized the need to bring together different actors to achieve strategic and operational insights (Douglas and Ansell, 2021; Kroll, 2022), but inviting a host of different participants also risks making the discussions overly divergent and confusing.

This study examines under which conditions a large diversity in participants in collective learning initiatives, leads to increased learning outcomes. The study draws on data from eighteen collaborative performance summits (Douglas and Ansell, 2023), where each summit brought together a different network of actors. The study explores whether summits with more diverse groups of participants were more productive in generating learning outcomes. The analysis also explores the role of conditional factors such as network leadership and the degree of pre-existing consensus between the actors, and whether strategic versus operational insights require different types of configurations.

The study finds that it takes several conditions to actually make the most of a diverse crowd of actors participating in a collaborative performance summit. The summits that generated a lot of operational insights, were actually relatively homogenous in their composition, just as they already had a fixed idea of the goals of the operations. The summits that generated a lot of strategic insights did contain a larger diversity of participants, but this only worked if there was also strong leadership present to make the diversity work.

The study contributes to ongoing research into collective learning (Gerlak and Heikilla, 2019; Douglas and Ansell, 2021; Kroll, 2022) and more specifically heeds the call for a more configurational understanding of when and where different types of learning arise (Riche, 2021). More generally, the study contributes to our understanding of how collaborations can deal with their complex environment, showing when and how they can put the diversity of their partners to good use.

Abstract: Despite there is growing literature on organizational performance evaluation following innovation adoption in the public sector, little research focuses on the innovation output indicators (Walker, Jeanes, and Rowlands 2002). Indeed, innovation output indicators, such as patents and publications in the private sector or research institutes, have been widely used by policymakers as a criterion to evaluate the performance of innovation directly. However, the direct transfer of this approach may not be practical and effective for the majority of public services. On the one hand, public sectors usually provide non-product services which lead to a fundamentally different approach to performance measurement. On the other hand, there are limited open data sources to measure and record the public sector innovation output. In this paper, we will pay attention to the innovation implementation after adoption, and define “innovation performance” as the public sector innovation output indicator.

Public service performance is typically measured in one of two ways: objective and subjective. Objective performance use “hard” metrics and “actual” data, which usually comes from public organization themselves, such as scores or indicators issued by a higher level of governments (Andrews, Boyne, and Walker 2011b). Subjective performance is a “soft” metric constructed by scholars and is often collected from citizen surveys to measure perceptions and attitudes about service delivery (Parks 1984). Some evidence shows that higher objective performance seems to positively affect subjective performance (Brown and Coulter 1983; Charbonneau and Van Ryzin 2012; Parks 1984).

However, some scholars also doubt the convergent validity between objective performance and perceived performance. There are findings showing that objective and subjective measurement is weakly related and not as perfect as we expected (Andrews, Boyne, and Walker 2006b; Jung and Kim 2014; Kelly 2003; Kelly and Swindell 2002). Although both objective and subjective performance are critical aspects of public service performance measures, convergent validity and discriminant validity have been important but contested issues in the public organization management literature. Those discussions provide some motivation for us to explore further the relationship between innovation performance from the objective and subjective measures. For public sector innovation, objective measures could capture some aspects of the consequences of innovation. And subjective measures are necessary to capture the other aspects/parts of innovation performance using a more comprehensive evaluation.

We probe one particular puzzle among the relationship between objective performance and perceived performance. The purpose of the research is to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of objective innovation performance on perceived innovation performance. Although public administration scholarship usually treats these as two performance measures in the public sector, existing research have found a mixed relationship between the objective and perceived measurements of performance. We focus our analysis on public sector innovation, using objective innovation performance and perceived innovation performance to measure innovation performance after adoption. Innovation characteristics are used to regard the cause of innovation adoption and reflect the perceptual feature of innovation. In this paper, we also focus on the mediation effect of five innovation characteristics. We argue that perceived innovation performance does indeed come from a higher level of objective innovation performance, and that is partially mediated by a respondent’s perception of innovation characteristics.

This study is based on the Bookstart Program in Taiwan, China. Bookstart is regarded as a novel service delivered by the local public libraries. For more detail on Bookstart, we have discussed it in the previous chapters. We hypothesize and empirically investigate this public sector innovation and its performance in the existing literature on public administration. Specifically, we explore how objective innovation performance and innovation characteristics within public sectors interact with perceived innovation performance. We conduct our analysis on the perceived performance, arguing that the Bookstart Program implementation results in the local leaders’ eyes does indeed come from a high level of the objective implementation performance, as well as the perceived characteristics of Bookstart. We hypothesise if the perception of innovation characteristics of superiority, compatibility, trialability, and observability are high and complexity is low, the perceived innovation performance would be higher. Together, these questions constitute an examination of the channels through whether and which innovation characteristics mediate the effect of objective innovation performance on perceived innovation performance.

Methodologically, we use OLS regression and a series of mediation tests following Baron and Kenny (1986) to investigate innovation performance issues between the objective and subjective levels and innovation characteristics. We collect and match individual survey data from the Bookstart Program of public libraries with secondary organization and township data. Based on the data set, we investigate using variables between individual-, institutional-, and township-level. The results show that objective innovation performance is positively associated with perceived innovation performance. Findings indicate that the positive impact of objective innovation performance on perceived innovation performance depends on the post-innovation characteristics defined as the leader’s sense of the innovation’s superiority, complexity, and compatibility after adoption.

This research contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence about innovation performance in the public sector. First, the research adds to growing literature about innovation and performance in public organizations. Scholars have found empirical evidence about past performance and innovation adoption, as well as the performance improvement after innovation adoption in the theoretical framework and literature review. While some studies focus on innovation and performance discussion, this research provides new evidence that evaluates the innovation output using both objective and subjective innovation performance, which are the most popular descriptions in the western context (Cucciniello and Nasi 2014; Salge and Vera 2009; (Ann) Torugsa and Arundel 2016; Walker 2005). Second, this research highlights the importance of objective innovation performance and innovation characteristics for the effect of perceived innovation performance in the public sector. Third, we aim to deliver the mediation effect of innovation characteristics between objective innovation performance and perceived innovation performance. The effect of objective innovation performance on perceived innovation performance is partially mediated by an individual’s perception of the innovation characteristics of superiority, complexity, and compatibility. Finally, we also aim to make an empirical contribution by focusing our research on East Asia, where public sector innovation and performance reform developed relatively later than the West. While there has been growing interest in public sector performance and innovation in Asia over recent decades, academic analyses based on empirical quantitative data have not received the same attention. This study is one of the first to analyze public sector innovation and its performance in the East using micro-level data and robust statistical methods.