Real performance? A study of faking in performance management

Performance management plays an important role in the public sectors, and since practitioners have adopted evidence-based approach, the employment of performance management will be doubtlessly pervasive. Performance management... [ view full abstract ]

Performance management plays an important role in the public sectors, and since practitioners have adopted evidence-based approach, the employment of performance management will be doubtlessly pervasive. Performance management is not a panacea, it also has systemic flaw, such as hardness of setting appropriate indicators (or using lower standards) and of accurate measurement, and previous research has dedicated to fix those problems. Nevertheless, there is still a tough challenge about faking in performance management under practical circumstances, and this issue has not attracted enough attention yet.
This article takes two regulatory cases as examples, drunk driving and dropout in compulsory education in Taiwan, to illustrate the phenomenon of faking in performance management. Through official statistics, these cases not only clarify that actors may display, but also demonstrate how law enforcement and school teachers struggle in dilemmas. We find much literature about faking in personality assessment and job interview, and this behavior should be seriously examined in the dimension of performance management as well, especially involving personnel promotion and rewards. In this article, we will show who are faking, which types of faking are used, why faking happened, and how to avoid faking in performance management. This issue is also relevant to “dark figure” in public statistics, and some discussion will be included.