New public management and performance management within public organizations: a literature review

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, public sector reforms have attracted the interest and attention of policy-makers, practitioners and academics worldwide. These reforms involve changes in the structures, culture, functions and processes of public organizations, and are referred to as "new public management". Thus, New Public Management reforms have been seen as solutions to the endemic problems affecting the public sector.

In this context, particular attention has been paid to improving the performance of public organizations and introducing performance management tools within them. The performance of public authorities is important to citizens and public managers alike. Citizens expect the law to be enforced, the environment to be protected, occupational health and safety laws to be respected, and a host of objectives to be met. Faced with the widespread conviction that there is a performance deficit at all levels of administration, public managers have continued to develop new methods for achieving public objectives.

This article reviews the long road travelled by public organizations before performance management practices were introduced in the same way as in the private sector. The literature review presented here shows that this introduction was made possible by a slow but lasting evolution in the management of these organizations, from the questioning of traditional approaches to public governance to the adoption of the principles advocated by the New Public Management movement, which nevertheless presents limitations that should not be overlooked when evaluating experiments based on its lessons. It also shows the particularities inherent to public organizations, which call for the necessary vigilance in the use of performance management mechanisms, which in turn have undergone considerable evolution within these organizations.

Keywords: performance management, public organizations, new public management

JEL Classification: H11, H00, H79, M00, M10, M19, M40, M49, M48

Paper type: Theoretical Research