Performance Managementand Performance Appraisal in the Public Sector

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss public performance management in general and performance appraisal and pay for performance specifically. Performance is a topic that is a popular catch-cry and performance management has become a new organizational ideology. Under the global economic crisis, almost every public and private organization is struggling with a performance challenge, one way or another. Various aspects of performance management have been extensively discussed in the literature. Many researchers and experts assert that sets of guidelines for design of performance management systems would lead to high performance (Kaplan and Norton, 1996, 2006). A long time ago, the traditional performance measurement was developed from cost and management accounting and such purely financial perspective of performance measures was perceived to be inappropriate so that multi-dimensional performance management was development in the 1970s (Radnor and McGuire, 2004).