A major tenet of New Public Management (NPM) inspired public management reforms of the 90’s and even the 2000’s was a largely unquestioned belief in the universal applicability of market type mechanisms, an emphatic instance of which are performance based incentives in public sector HRM. Since the second half of the decade, however, accumulated experience, changing ideational forces and fashions as well as dramatic external shocks (such as, most of all, the economic and fiscal crisis unfolding in 2008) seem to have exerted a lasting and pregnant reversal on this trend. This turn – frequently denoted as post-NPM (Christensen and Laegreid 2007, Drechsler and Randma-Liiv 2014) – appears clearly in many areas of public management practices ranging from de-agencification and structural centralization (van Thiel 2011, Verhoest et al. 2012) to increasing -government involvement in the business/corporate regulation and oversight (Kickert and Randma-Liiv 2015). This shift in the influential doctrines and practices is clearly visible. However, when it comes to either the theoretically based expectations and normative claims or the actual practices regarding the application of performance appraisal schemes the picture continues to be highly controversial.
Already since the introduction of the individual performance appraisal within the realm of New Public Management, many studies have shown its problematic nature related to intentional or unintentional assessment errors (e.g. Milkovich, G., Newman, J., Gerhart, B. 2014). These negative attitudes allegedly lead to reduced support on the side of the civil servants to inaccurate performance results or even formalism. On the other hand some researchers (e.g. Antonioni 1994) argued that rather than throwing out the entire performance appraisal systems and process, we should try to improve it. Apart from this mixed theoretical landscape the reliance on performance based HRM practices seems continually be, on the basis of recent survey data (EUPAN 2017), on the rise.
The key puzzle of this research is related to this tension – possibly gap – between theory and practice. We address two research questions. Firstly, what were the main trends in terms of performance based HRM practices in Europe over the past decade? In particular, to what extent and in what contexts can we witness a stalemate or, possibly, reversal of the proliferation of NPM-inspired HRM practices? Secondly, on the basis of available data what explanations can be put forward that may underlie the hypothesized resilience of such HRM practices? The empirical basis of the research is country level data base of European HRM practices covering 16 European countries. The data base is compiled on the basis of two surveys of legal framework for performance based HRM conducted by EUPAN in 2007 and 2017. In order to be able to analyze not only the formal framework – frequently implemented only partially or selectively – these data were supplemented by country level, aggregated data of a survey of senior civil servant on performance based HRM practices in sixteen European countries under the auspices of the COCOPS project.
Strategic management and public service performance in the New Public Governance era
