INSTITUTIONAL ISOMORPHISM, NEGATIVITY BIAS AND PERFORMANCE INFORMATION USE BY POLITICIANS: A SURVEY EXPERIMENT

New Public Management popularized performance measurement (PM) in public organizations. Underlying PM’s popularity, is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision-making thus rationalizing the... [ view full abstract ]

New Public Management popularized performance measurement (PM) in public organizations. Underlying PM’s popularity, is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision-making thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite PM’s popularity, it is criticized. In part, this criticism results from the limited knowledge on why PI is used by politicians. We conduct a survey experiment based on real PI with 1.210 politicians. We hypothesize that PI has a positive impact on performance information use (PIU) when PI is benchmarked with a coercive, mimetic or normative institutional pressure. Moreover, we expect this positive impact to be stronger when PI is negative. We find that coercive and normative pressures indeed have a positive impact on intended PIU but only normative pressures have a positive impact on actual PIU. Moreover, mimetic pressures have a positive impact on actual PIU but only when PI is negative. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.