Understanding hybridity of performance management systems in public organizations: an integrated framework of analysis

Performance management is generally expected to enhance the rationality of policy-making and management (Van Dooren and Van de Walle, 2016) throughout evidence-based approach, and support effective multi-level governance. It is widely considered a key point for public management to advance across developmental phases, and a reflection for different public management models’ characteristics (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994; Liguori et al., 2016; Osborne et al., 2013). However, an increasing number of scholars have addressed the topic of hybridity in public administration logics Christensen and Lægreid, 2011; Denis et al., 2015): public administrative systems seldom fit into one particular paradigm (Iacovino et al., 2015); on the contrary, they often exist as hybrid systems that are layered with characteristics of various paradigms overlapping one another (Ugyel, 2016). The study analyses the characteristics of different performance management systems (PMSs) in the context of a regional authority in Italy under the lenses of hybridity (Denis et al., 2015), throughout a nested case study (Starman, 2013). A framework of analysis considering both objective and subjective factors was derived from a combination of performance models in public sector, namely ideal types of managing performance (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2007) and performance regimes (Jakobsen et al., 2017). The combination of the above-mentioned models’ characteristics across different Directorates General (DGs) was explored throughout a desk analysis of planning and programming official documents of the regional authority and DGs and two rounds of in-depth interviews with top-level managers. Firstly, planning and programming documents of the regional authority were analysed in order to identify the characteristics and underlying design process, and to extract available goals and indicators; secondly, interviews were analysed with Nvivo software to enrich the preliminary results. Emerging results were separately discussed by two components of the research group and, when divergent, discussed and confirmed by a third component in order to enhance the soundness of the results (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Drawing on Bouckaert and Halligan (2007) and Jakobsen et al. (2017), the findings of the study nurture a discussion on the hybrid nature of PMSs within a common institutional context. The paper eventually highlights some emerging point for future research and provides an integrated framework of analysis for PMSs.