Abstract
Performance
management is based on the premise that the clarification of corporate
objectives, the institution of measures in pursuit of the objectives, and the
empowerment of managers are all it takes to energize organizations and orient
them towards incremental productivity, cost reduction and "customer"
satisfaction. However, regardless of the attention given to performance
management in formal bureaucratic and in latter-day matrix organization
structures, diversity in the stakeholders’ world-view constitutes a major
stumbling block to productivity gains. With particular reference to the
African public service, whatever new performance management initiatives are
contemplated should not only capitalize on the continent’s diversity but
also deflect the threats that this diversity poses to organizational momentum
and to the attainment of the goals of good governance and development. This
requires revisiting the assumptions underlying New Public Management, and
focusing on the impact of agency governance on conflict and on performance.
Introduction
The essence of performance
management lies in its professed ability to focus the attention of
organization members on a common objective and galvanize them towards the
attainment of this objective. This presupposes that the internal and the
external stakeholders, at the minimum, share a vision of the greatest good
that demands the energies and commitment of all. It is this assumption of
harmony of vision that underpins the New Public Management’s faith in
leadership and the school’s favourable inclination towards managerial
"empowerment".
This romantic view of
performance management needs to be critically examined for at least three
reasons. First, the term, performance management, is yet to be precisely
defined, and there is no consensus on an appropriate strategy for initiating
and sustaining it. Second, the high degree of heterogeneity prevailing in
Africa frequently militates against the unity of purpose required to make
performance management programmes work in the public service. Third, the
unpredictable nature of human character calls into question an agency
governance strategy that trusts leadership with near absolute power.
In assessing the prospects
for the successful inauguration of performance management initiatives in the
African public service, this paper begins by raising a number of conceptual
issues. The second section examines the challenges facing the African
continent and identifies areas in which performance management – howsoever
defined – could prove most beneficial to the African public service. The
impact of Africa’s diversity on performance management is another subject
discussed in the section. The third section recalls past efforts at ‘turbo-charging’
the African public service, and wonders whether these efforts qualified as
"performance management" or succeeded in repositioning the service
for the governance and development challenges highlighted in the previous
section. The fourth and the concluding sections look into the future and
suggest measures aimed at plugging performance deficits in the African public
service while at the same time reckoning with the miscellaneous obstacles.
I. Agency Governance and
Performance Improvement: The Model and the Context
In pursuit of the goal of
performance improvement, the New Public Management (NPM) not only insists on
the adoption of private sector practices in public institutions, but also
advocates the "empowerment" of managers. By "empowerment"
is meant vesting the public manager with the power and authority s/he needs to
serve the citizen, and to strengthen the links between government and its
diverse clientele in civil society (CAPAM, 1994). Underlying the empowerment
premise is the assumption that the power or authority that is
"delegated" to the average manager would not only be shared with the
subordinates, but would also be exercised for public good (Osborne and Gaebler,
1992; Hope, 2001; Armacost, 2000).
The argument advanced in
this paper is that, at least in the African context, the performance
improvement claim of NPM rests on a tenuous foundation. When examined against
the context within which public institutions operate in Africa, NPM proves
thoroughly inadequate. Like the previous management fads, it fails to come to
grips with the mammoth challenge – the challenge of social transformation
– facing the public service. Worse still, by sneaking in hierarchy through
the backdoor, NPM reinforces oligarchic control in public agencies, thereby
frustrating public choice and defeating the purpose of performance
improvement. The model advocated in this paper is one focusing on agency
governance. As presented in the paper, agency governance rests of four
pillars, i.e., the role of civil society in holding public agencies to
account, the pattern in the exercise of political power, the professional and
ethical basis of managerial authority, and the credibility of the prevailing
rules regime. Before discussing the strengths of the model, it is essential
that the key terms be defined.
Performance Management and
Productivity Gains: Exploring the Links
Performance management
cannot escape the consequences of the identity crisis confronting the field of
which it is a part - that is the field loosely referred to as
"administration" or "management". Whereas engineers,
accountants, statisticians, surgeons, and astronomers have little difficulty
delineating the boundaries of their disciplines, administration (alias
management) has been struggling since the dawn of history to define itself.
While ‘to administer’ is sometimes equated with to ‘govern’, ‘rule’,
‘control’, or ‘direct’, it should not come as a surprise if the same
term surfaces in another time and place as ‘operate’, ‘make
something/someone work’, ‘relate means to ends’, ‘dispense’ (drugs)
or ‘resort to trickery and deceitful contrivance’.
A definition that promises
to get us quickly out of the quagmire and move us close to ‘performance
management’ is that provided by John Vieg. According to him (Vieg, 1946),
administration is "the systematic ordering of affairs and the calculated
use of resources aimed at making those things happen which we want to happen
and simultaneously preventing the developments that fail to square with our
intentions". This would appear to approximate the goal and essence of
performance management. As a concept, performance management takes ‘management’
to a higher plane by anticipating everything that could possibly go wrong with
corporate strategies, decision rules, institutions, processes, and people.
Performance management is not a mere routine activity, but a dynamic,
momentum-geared, trouble-shooting, and impact-oriented process. In essence,
therefore, performance management has to do with focusing the attention of an
organisation and its constituent parts on the attainment of specified
objectives (corporate strategy) and on the application of constantly changing
processes, techniques and technologies (tactics).
Where an organization is
faced with competing demands and shrinking resources, productivity is most
likely to be what it "wants to see happen". In any case, the
dominant concern of performance management in recent years is productivity
improvement, or "the production of more and/or better services for each
tax dollar and staff hour invested" (Halachmi and Holzer, 1986; and
Greiner, 1986). Hence, the attention accorded to factors such as top
management support (or what is often termed ‘political will’ and
commitment), application of performance standards and indicators, installation
of a performance measurement system, supervision and motivation of staff,
staff training, performance budgeting and accounting, and community
involvement. As Lee observes (Lee 2000:423), productivity management is an
open system made up of three domains, i.e., the environmental domain
(public/private partnership, marketing of public service delivery), the
organizational domain (structural changes, labour-management relations,
information and communications technology), and the individual domain
(performance incentives, professionalism, and staff development and training).
If focusing on "what we
want to see happen" is the defining attribute of performance management,
we are still far from reaching a consensus on the concept’s real meaning.
For one thing, the "we" in an organization stands for different
entities and individuals whose world-views are rarely in harmony. First, where
the stress of performance management is on the measurement of achievements,
the monitors will be hard put to find an indicator that is valid for all times
and places. What passes for excellent performance one day may in fact belong
to the mediocre category at a latter date when a new, and more rigorous
performance standard is applied. However, managers, being adept at what
van Thiel and Leeuw term "positive learning" (van Thiel and Leeuw,
2002;268-9), will always stick to the old, easily achievable standard so as to
look good each time their performance is evaluated. Where managers submit
themselves to a new standard, they are not unknown to resort to another trick.
Specifically, knowing that their performance is under observation and their
jobs are on the line, they are wont to shift resources to ‘high profile’
projects and activities – those that are of interest to performance
auditors. The name given to this trick is negative learning (van Thiel and
Leeuw, 2002:268-9).
Positive and negative
learning are measures of differences in managerial perspectives. Both, at
best, reflect the managers’ conflicting notions of their role, and at worst,
stand for cynical interpretations of "management" and
"performance". Inconsistent as they both are with the real essence
of performance management, the managers’ positive and negative learning
inclinations have a less devastating impact on performance and productivity
than another type of conflict in perspective. This is the diversity triggered
by the multiple and competing identities in the work place. In the classical
scientific management literature, the conflict that receives a lot of
attention is that between ‘management’ and the workers. In today’s world
of work, diversity or discord knows no hierarchical or socio-economic
boundaries. It intervenes between or among races, ethnic nationalities,
regions, cultures, religious beliefs, and, increasingly, sexes.
The individuals and the
groups operating in, or benefiting from the services rendered by,
organizations bring to the three (environmental, organizational and
individual) domains mentioned earlier prejudices, fears, insecurities and
other attitudes that are capable of taking performance in unintended
directions. As far as performance and its management is concerned, it is not
the difference in the range of probable ‘identities’ an individual brings
to the work place that matters, but the interpretation given to, and
the values placed on, the primordial loyalties vis-à-vis
identification with formal organisations. Equally important is the ‘price’
the individual is prepared to pay to retain the cherished identities (Balogun,
2001, and 2002).
Diversity triggers conflict
and tension, both of which may, in fact, help rather than hinder the cause of
performance management. As noted by Lewin (1935) human beings do not live in a
tensionless world. In fact, a minimum degree of tension is what human beings
need to excel in their chosen fields and to find creative solutions to
contemporary problems. At times, however, conflict becomes so mismanaged that
the tension accompanying it ceases to be edifying and, instead, generates a
lot of animus between or among individuals and groups. Rather than promote
healthy competition, conflicts mismanaged divert the attention of actors away
from corporate objectives and productivity, engender hate and distrust, and
expose productive forces in the organization to "friendly fires".
Evasion of responsibility, desertion of posts, offer and/or acceptance of
bribes – these and other performance-inhibiting attitudes - are all symptoms
of mismanaged conflict, and they pose momentous agency governance challenges.
Successful management of
performance hinges on the extent to which the formulators and the implementers
of corporate strategies both in word and in deed align these strategies
with the needs and aspirations of all the stakeholders. Specifically, whether
or not conflict (and, in the final analysis, performance) will be properly
managed is a function of the prevailing agency governance ethos. To the extent
that the internal governance culture promotes, among all the stakeholders, a
sense of shared values to that would the conflicting forces be harnessed for
performance and productivity. This requires, at the very least, focusing on
behaviour at four levels – i.e., the civil society, the political choice and
empowerment, the formal and discretionary authority, and the rules
interpretation and application levels.
Civil Society and Agency
Governance
Focusing narrowly on
internal "management" processes to the exclusion of the momentum
challenges taking place in the external environment will not take us very far
– if the goal is enhance the capacity of the public service to respond to
growing and insistent demands from civil society. The role of civil society
has undoubtedly received a lot attention in recent years. The DPMF has
organised a series of workshops focusing on the role of non-state actors in
extending the democratic space and promoting sound governance practices and
development (Bujra and Adejumobi, 2002; Bujra and Buthelezi, 2002). To-date,
however, this democratisation role has not extended to the sphere of
the management – nay, the governance – of public institutions. It
is true that the flowering of civil society has compelled many a government
agency to review its internal management mechanisms with a view to meeting
"customer demands" (Balogun, 2001a; Kyarimpa, 1996). However, until
the interface between civil society participation and agency governance
is strengthened, the performance of the agencies would continue to fall below
public expectations.
Politics, Power, and
Performance Management
The political class has a
major role to play in articulating as well as aggregating civil society
"demands" and in fulfilling public expectations. This underscores
the importance attached to the quest for the people’s mandate or for
political power. Power, after all, is a factor that is frequently equated with
the ability to choose from a range of goals. It is a weapon that its custodian
deploys to make those things happen which s/he wants to see happen regardless
of what the powerless may feel on the subject. In much the same way as energy
propels objects into action and sustains momentum in the physical world, power
in the political arena enables those entrusted with it to translate their
dreams into concrete achievements. It enables taxes to be collected, dams and
bridges to be constructed, factories and residential units to be connected to
the national grid, law and order to be maintained, and national airlines to
fly to distant destinations laden with passengers and cargo.
If this is all there is to
power – making good things happen – many of those struggling to
acquire it would be glad to leave it in other hands. However, power serves
objectives other than the noble ones. With it, dissidents is kept in
preventive detention, the mint is placed on overtime saturating the economy
with valueless currencies, weapons of mass destruction are produced, favours
are sold or purchased under the counter, and grand corruption is permitted to
thrive along with its petty associate. It is this potential of power to make
for the good as well as the bad that turns the struggle for it into a
do-or-die affair for politicians in different parts of the world, sub-Saharan
Africa included. The powerless is unlikely to submit meekly to the abuse and
the humiliation that come with his/her underclass status, and will, over time,
begin to give serious thought to power transfer options. The fierce and
intense competition for power has been known to degenerate into bloody
confrontations, and into full-scale civil or military conflict –
particularly, in societies where the "rules of engagement" are
blurred.
Where political differences
assume an ethnic, racial, regional, or religious character, the key actors are
likely to be more interested in bringing the crown to the "homeland"
than in deploying power to promote qualitative change in governance, stem
economic decline, alleviate poverty, improve public service performance, or
secure productivity gains. Indeed, instead of seeking common cause on national
development, ethnic advocacy groups may not be averse to throwing spanners in
the opponents’ works. Ake (1994) puts all this down to "political
anxiety", i.e., the fear of the consequences of power gravitating
towards, and remaining with, "outsiders" and "enemies".
Elsewhere, the author also wonders whether the clamour for "power
shift" or "rotational presidency" in Nigeria would not lead to
the "rotation" of clientelism and corruption (Balogun, 1997).
If the aim is to improve the
lot of the ordinary citizen, politics would have to show increasing interest
in policy – specifically, in the cost, benefits, and long-term
developmental implications, of intended courses of action. This is where it
(politics) sorely needs analytic inputs and research support – resources
that are only available in institutions of higher learning, within
think-tanks, and in the career civil service. However, because of the
unstructured nature of political competitions, serious intellectuals are more
likely to stick to what they know best than show the slightest interest in
"mundane" matters like politics. For their own part, career civil
servants generally find the political terrain too rough and too hazardous, and
would in all probability perish the thought of "dirtying" their
hands working with political cadres.
If career officials do not
think highly of partisan politics, the feeling among the politicians tends to
be mutual. The latter cannot understand how anyone could be trusted with power
(or even authority) who has taken no risk seeking grass root support, and who,
for that very reason, is out of touch with the "reality" on the
ground (Soneye and Balogun, 1981, Wamalwa, 1986:66-68). From the point of view
of performance management, the two sides need each other more than they
realize.
Authority, Institutional
Governance and Performance Improvement
Whereas power is most often
associated with the ‘lawless’ world of politics, authority would, at
least, on the surface, appear to be meant for the cultured and the
rule-abiding public service environment. Legal-rational authority, after all,
prides itself on the interposition of order in the place of chaos, and of
reason where whims, caprices, and emotions might have once reigned
unchallenged. While "power" may be conscripted into the service of
the good or the bad – depending on the prevailing circumstances –
authority is, at least, in theory, meant to serve only worthy causes. It is
this abiding faith in the "rationality" of formal bureaucratic
authority that accounts for the double-talk and the conceptual muddle now
associated with NPM. On the one hand, adherents of the school view management
as a rational process (making happen what policy says should happen). On the
other, NPM confuses, or lumps, this process with the exercise of raw political
power (that is, with the "mandate" that electors confer on their
accredited "representatives" to govern and to determine policy
choices). Hope (2001), for instance, sees no difference between the
"delegation" of formal authority to career officials and the
"devolution" of (political) power to elected bodies. According to
him (Hope 2001:125),
"Devolution is the
granting of decision-making powers to lower (elected) authorities or
(professional) managers and allowing them to take full responsibility
without reference back to the authorizing government….Devolution is
the strongest form of decentralization. Its essence is discretionary
authority …."
There are legitimate reasons
for trusting the professional manager with authority and power simultaneously.
If the politician does not care about performance improvement, productivity is
supposed to be the raison d’tre of the manager’s interventions
within the "legal-rational" bureaucracy. In place of the shocks,
surprises and upsets encountered in the political arena established rules and
procedures intervene to render behaviour predictable in the manager’s world.
The formal authority of the career bureaucracy thus makes those things happen
which every reasonable and rules-guided person would like to see happen
- notwithstanding the interference of a major "stumbling block",
politics.
In theory, therefore, career
managers not only find "politics" distasteful but also operate in a
setting that frowns on capricious and arbitrary behaviour. In practice, the
line separating "politics" from administration or management is so
fine to be invisible (Lungu, 1998:3; and Mainzer (1973). While their oath of
office forbids them to participate in partisan politics or to canvass
for votes, career managers participate in another – the bureaucratic - kind
of politics, with the passion, energy, and belligerence normally associated
with the real thing. Within their own space and in their own time, civil
servants can be as political as, if not more so than, the politicians that
they barely tolerate and seek so much to keep at a distance (Ciroma, 1981).
The political inclination
of career managers takes different forms. First, career officials are not
beyond passing on to their political masters a few rule-bending tricks, if
only to gain the latter’s confidence. Secondly, the "authority"
that the career officials exercise in their own right – but which springs
from the power or "mandate" of the government of the day – offers
the career officials a wide "political" latitude. The authority
(say, that of a police commissioner, a customs officer, factory and trade
premises inspector, personnel officer, or executive assistant to the boss),
is, after all, not only of the formal and statutorily defined type, but can
also take the discretionary form. Executive or administrative
discretion may be all that is needed to move staff from one office to another,
to promote (presumably loyal and dedicated) staff, to award contracts to one
firm rather than another, to demolish "illegal" structures, and to
apprehend and detain a suspect. Indeed, as far as the developing countries of
Africa are concerned, the average senior civil servant was long
"empowered" before NPM came up with the idea.
Like power, the formal and
the discretionary authority exercised by the public manager may serve good or
evil ends. It is under the cover of discretionary darkness that the official
most frequently unleashes his/her frustrations on real and imaginary enemies,
and bestows favours on clients and trusted lieutenants. Naturally, those in
the official’s favour would always band together to retain their privileges,
and the "outsiders" will gravitate towards "opposition" or
adversarial roles. How performance could, under such an environment – one
characterised by mutual suspicion and distrust - be "managed" to
achieve enhanced productivity, and guarantee "customer"
satisfaction, is any one’s guess.
The Rules Regime
Depending on the degree of
consistency and transparency with which they are applied, the rules may serve
as an arbiter in conflict situations. As a trust-engendering mechanism, the
rules enable all parties to a compact to fulfil their obligations confident
that no party would exit without paying a price (Rowthorn, 1999:661-691).
It may be argued that by
"tying the hands" of officials, the rules only make the organization
lose the momentum needed to manage performance and to record productivity
increases. As argued by the NPM adherents, the manager knows what s/he wants,
and the rules merely intervene to slow him down and to prevent him from taking
precisely the action that is necessary to beat the competition. Where nothing
gets done until the rules are consulted, so the argument goes, authority will
reside, not in the producers of goods and services but in rules interpreters
and enforcers – who are probably minor officials hitting back at hierarchy
from below. These guardians of the rules will not be interested in performance
or productivity, but in making internal and external "customers" to
bow and cringe to have their problems solved. Rather than confine themselves
to substantive legislation, the new de facto bosses will elevate every
inconsequential procedure or work flow arrangement into "rules" so
as to justify their own existence, inflate their importance, and expand their
scope of influence – most often, beyond the statutory limits.
Some of NPM’s conclusions
on the performance-inhibiting effects of rules are valid. As a matter of fact,
unless decisive action is taken, the rules may offer precisely the excuse the
indolent official needs to refrain from tackling a problem, or a pretext for
arbitrary action. Officials looking for absolution from moral responsibility
always hide behind hierarchy and "the rules" when implementing
abhorrent decisions. It is this excessive deference to hierarchical rules that
explains the decision of Zambia’s chief of intelligence to, on his own
admission, act on a presidential order to divert state and external donor
funds to the coffers of a leading political party. If this claim is
subsequently confirmed, the intelligence chief’s blind obedience would have
constituted serious interference with the electoral process – an act that is
capable of inhibiting Zambia’s democratic advance (htto://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/01/30/zambia.graft.reut/index.html).
Even then, to argue that the
cause of performance management dictates total dismantling of the rules may be
pushing the argument to extreme limits. To begin with, the assumption of an
all-knowing manager will not stand close scrutiny. Modern organizations are
too complex to be successfully run as personal fiefdoms. They require a whole
range of knowledge, skills and aptitudes that are clearly beyond the reach of
a single individual or a narrow circle of officials. Needless to add that a
system whose fate hangs on personalities rather than on institutions and rules
is bound to disintegrate on the exit of its "strong man" (Balogun,
2003). In any case, it is not unlikely that the authority given to a manager
to override the rules may in fact be applied towards unwholesome ends. The
Zambia case cited earlier is of "empowerment" gone out of control.
To allow individuals the freedom to decide when to comply with the rules is to
confer unlimited licence on buccaneers without a prior guarantee of successful
or beneficial innovation (Balogun and Mutahaba, 1999). Besides, the conflict
that a despotic, rules-defying exercise of power frequently triggers cannot be
successfully contained no matter what performance miracle cures are tried.
Indeed,
one challenge that NPM is yet to fully address is how to hold the empowered
manager accountable – to the internal and external stakeholders, and to the
rules (Kernaghan, 1992; Haque, 2000; Argyriades, 2002). Until the issue of
accountability is fully and satisfactorily addressed, empowerment can only
spark intra-agency conflict and turf wars, and divert attention from issues of
concern to the public (Balogun, 2002a: 537).
Managing Performance and Conflict
The upshot of the preceding
analysis is that performance management must go hand in hand with conflict
anticipation and management. While focusing on pure managerial variables
(i.e., the environmental, organizational and individual variables), particular
attention should be given to the analysis of the impact of intra-agency
politics and governance, and of the prevailing rules regime on conflict, and
therefore, on performance. Unfortunately, as indicated later, previous
attempts at reforming the public service and making it performance-oriented
have under-rated the significance of politics in the process. Instead of
applying a holistic and organic approach to public service reform, governments
have settled for partial and mechanisti