Companies live or die by innovation. To respond to relentless market pressures and stay competitive, drawing from many people with complementary resources, skills, and talents, the finest among them take (and find ways to reduce) risks: they invest in organizational, technical, and social novelties and reward handsomely for new or significantly improved products, services, processes, and methods of delivery (or other elements of their business models, such as policy and strategy or system interaction). In these types of organization, performance management tools, methods, and approaches are but one, albeit important, way of securing organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Many public sector agencies, by contrast, merely hope for incremental improvement. Policy makers have been slow to appreciate that the public sector should build public services around requirements, rather than making them fit existing arrangements with outdated one-size-fits-all approaches. “Business as usual—if possible better” might be the motto of these near-monopolies: innovation is typically seen as an optional, technological extra or an added burden.

To be fair, however, and this is the main point, the public sector operates under an exigent set of concerns, demands, interests, pressures, and restrictions that make it a far more open—and therefore complex when not chaotic—system. Not surprisingly, therefore, what innovation does come to pass is politically directed innovation instigated by crisis, organizational turnarounds initiated by agency heads, and a modicum of bottom-up innovation driven by champions. The time horizons are typically short. Irrespective, all endeavors, such as the use of performance management tools, must at some point secure political or bureaucratic support. There will be a chance if, an important aside, values, resources, and processes are then harnessed in tandem. Concluding, it is more often than not pressure from stakeholders, or lack thereof, that conditions change or the status quo in public sector organizations.

To make a simple and quick answer to a question that would request extensive research, and to limit myself to the French situation: I would say that in French State agencies and public administration, including public hospitals, the main incentive to use performance management practices and tools (regardless of the value of these tools) is the pressure to reduce costs and to modernize the public system. T2A is such an example (good or bad) of "tool" used in French public hospitals since 2004.

The LOLF (Loi organique sur les lois de finances 2001, 2006) has introduced management control and cost accounting in the management of public policies in order to improve performance. The LOLF which strives to rationalize pubic expenses requires such performance tools. "To guide , measure and improve the effectiveness of their implementation, are indeed defined for each program strategy , objectives and performance indicators". 

http://www.performance-publique.budget.gouv.fr/budget-comptes-etat/lolf-cadre-organique-lois-finances/essentiel/lolf-en-4-clics/plus-performance#.VovD24ThHZ8

Several other laws and regulations, such as the "Loi de modernisation de la fonction publique" (2007) push in the same direction and tend to take over management practices and tools developed in the private sector. 

http://www.carrieres-publiques.com/ Pourquoi+la+performance+bouleverse+la+fonction+publique.../2814-revue.htm

In public municipalities, where decision-making is more decentralized, other factors may play a role, from political shades and political competition, the burden of the debt cost to local citizens, lavish expenses and scandals named and shamed by the Cour des comptes and French medias, up to reforms to improve the quality of public service to users. 

One example of this French "new public manager" in municipal public administration: Sylvie FREY-GAUTIER, "Le manager territorial comme levier de performance de l’organisation ?" (2007).  

Otherwise, people from ENA and Cour des comptes could be a good source of information for you ... for a start!

Good luck!  

There are many answers to this. I will only address two that are key, in my experience.

First, any performance measurement relies on consistent definitions of success among the stakeholders. In the private sector, this is pretty simple because all the stockholders want the same thing. In the public sector, stakeholder perspectives differ, sometimes widely. Consider the question of education. If you ask 100 people 'do you want your children to get a good education?', They will be almost unanimous. The moment to you begin to define 'a good education', consensus begins to break down. Should a high school graduate be able to do calculus, play the violin, speak a foreign language, prepare automobile, or interpret classic literature? You will be able to find supporters for these and other perspectives among the stakeholders. Therefore, performance measurement with respect to the quality of the education received is problematic. We ran into this during the Oregon State strategic planning process and struggled with it, without reaching a definitive endpoint.

Another important question arises when you consider 'when to measure'.During my tenure with the Department of Commerce, we were trying to measure the performance of economic development investments. Many of these activities were, or had significant components of, public works projects. For instance, if we funded a major remodel of the facility that became a business incubator, could easily take two years before any measurable activity was even initiated. However, the annual budget cycle and the two, four, and six year office terms of the decision-makers, among other factors, required annual performance reporting. Over time, we managed to convince everyone that performance measurement three, six, and nine years after the investment was appropriate but it was an uphill struggle. In addition, I recall one business incubator that was doing very well at three and six years but had zero activity at nine years. I sent one of my staff on site visit and she found that it was a complete success story and that our measurement process was biased. This small business incubator had both of its clients launch successful IPOs and move out to new headquarters, where they expanded employment and made significant capital investment in the communities. Unfortunately, these events were coincident with our measurement benchmark.

As a senior civil servant and academic, I have been involved in government performance measurement for decades. The one thing I know for sure is that there are no simple answers to this question. Good luck.

It depends on the public entities choice to use of the strategic planning approach or not.

The strategic planning approach requires performance management framework to monitor entity performance in achieving its goals and objectives. While, those public entities who don't adopt this approach, there is no need fro them to use performance management and KPIs

 We say -not extended- briefly; This is related to the vision of the its own ministry or parent organization.

Making this short and sweet loves - 

--Employee commitment

--Leadership effectiveness

--Communication effectiveness

--Employee Commitment

-- Leadership Anxiety

- Fear of Disruptive Innovation

What are the indicators or variables (attributes) to measure organizational effectiveness? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_the_indicators_or_variables_attributes_to_measure_organizational_effectiveness [accessed Jan 6, 2016].

Hello David,

just one aspect that has somehow but not explicitly been mentioned in the comments above: this is also a cultural question. Performance / competition-orientation highly differs between cultures. Secondly, in some cultures, respect of work process (rules and procedures) are valued, while others mostly focus on work outcomes (like in management by objectives).

Schneider, S., J.-L. Barsoux, et al. (2014). Managing across cultures. London, Pearson. give a very good overview on authors who have defined dimensions of culture and critiques addressed to them. You will be able to distinguish which of those dimensions are related to your topic - if you are interested in this aspect.

If you research question is about comparing public organizations internationally, I think you should absolutely take this aspect into account. If not, you could just position the country/ies you are studying in this context.

Good luck with your research!

Dear David,

Several experts have given answer to your question. I would like to put a simple perspective. What gets measured gets done. If we measure wrong indices wrong things will get done. Thus, several organisations who are using thes indices mignt have found their measurement parameters right, so they are keep on using performance mesurement indicators. On the other hand, if some of the organisations felt their indicators are not giving the desired results, they stopped using these performance indicators.

One more thing, each indicator ultimately leads to a man performing some task. If your employees are highly motivated and doing the job very wel, you don't need a measurement tool. After al it is the heart which makes a man to work. 

Best regards,

Hello,

I think the beside procedures the most important are people with his attitude, vision and personality. People (staff) are a clou of of the problem - I think.

Hello David.

I think that one of the main reasons why this happens, is explained by the conflict of interests among the various stakeholders of the organization. A theoretical reference that comes to my mind is the "Theory of the agency."

Regards

Dear colleagues,

I thank you very much for your answers and for the time you spent to give me your comments and opinions. All of them are very interesting and will be of great interest for my future research. Best regards,

David

I am going to be a naysayer. Despite all the HR texts that advocate for and go to great pains to describe the utility of performance management processes, the painful truth is that they seldom deliver what people expect and/or what they promise. They tend to be overly complex and time-consuming processes of (to my of thinking) questionable value.

The policy of some government organizations confine this. This in fact needs to be updated. In a public organization I am associated with, the performance appraisal results are kept confidential. The forms and formats are predefined and the same is used to for all positions.

p.s. Information itself is plural

My guess is that they are trying to measure their outputs, decide on key goals etc. Some public organizations may not know much on how to implement quality management to measure and integrate their outcomes.  For example, if you asked a key decision maker: What is a high performing public organization and how do you measure it... many may not know how to answer. Why? because there outcome is to provide to the public... and it is not based on money... so do you look at A help  quota?