Mapping the Use of Performance Information Across Hierarchical Levels

Recent research indicate, that documentation requirements pop-up like mushrooms in the woods and that increasing amounts of performance information are being produced, but that it rarely is being used in a purposeful way (de Bruijn, 2007). The role of the information users vary, but often the employees don’t see the purpose of collecting the data, as they do not use the data themselves, and this leads to problems of low data quality. At the same time the production of performance information is costly and can essentially only be justified, if performance information is being used in decision-making to improve performance.
Moynihan et al. (2012) have conceptualized the use of performance information as being either purposeful, political, perverted or passive. A rapidly growing literature is looking into the factors, which drives the purposeful use of performance information, while the political, perverted or passive uses of performance information have received less systematic attention. Furthermore, the role of the users of performance information needs more attention (Kroll, 2015). It is important to find out if the use of performance information varies across different levels of the organization as the passive collection of data in one part of the organization may be justified if it is used for decision-making and performance improvements in another part of the organization. Therefore, this paper set out to investigating the different uses of performance information across different hierarchical levels. Thus this paper investigates the use of performance information as being either purposeful, political, perverted or passive across different hierarchical levels in one particular sector namely the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services. The data consists of document analysis where the documentation requirements issued by central government are mapped. Furthermore, three interlinked surveys are carried out: 1) a survey to the directors of pre-school services at the local government level (n=98), 2) a survey of managers of day-care institutions in 10 municipalities (n=350) and 3) a survey of employees in day-care services in 10 municipalities (n=1000). Across the different layers the respondents are asked if the performance information collected is used to improve the service quality (purposeful), for advocacy in a political environment (political), moves focus to measurement rather than the overall goals (perverse), or the performance information collected is actually not being used (perverse). Hereby we hope to contribute with an analysis of where in the organization performance information is being used and for what.