While the issue of performance gained recognition under the New Public Management(NPM) paradigm in the 1980s, in Korea, it was since the Asian financial crisis that the performance management emerged as an important issue for the private and public se...
While the issue of performance gained recognition under the New Public Management(NPM) paradigm in the 1980s, in Korea, it was since the Asian financial crisis that the performance management emerged as an important issue for the private and public sector. Particularly, the year of 2016 was marked by heated controversy regarding the implementation of performance-based pay system in the public sector introduced as a key element of sector wide reform. The government predicted that introducing the performance based salary system would improve productivity, strengthen incentives by paying capacity-based wages, help superior manpower, and improve efficiency of personnel management. However, the Moon Jae-in government, which came into this year, is pushing for the abolition of such performance-based salary system.
In this paper, I set up a model that hypothesizes that the performance management of organization leads to the performance of public sector employees, in order to examine whether proper performance management enhances the performance of individual civil servants. Further compared was whether there are differences in performance among high level and lower level public servants, public servants with and without previous experience in the private sector, and between genders. In addition, whether the results of individual performance evaluation, one criteria for evaluation of organizational performance, plays a role in the relationship between the organizational performance management and performance of individual civil servants was tested.
Three different models were established according to types of relationship between organizational commitment and job involvement, the intervening variables between organizational performance management and public personnel performance. The Model 2 that hypothesizes a simple causal relationship between organizational commitment and job involvement and the Model 3 that hypothesizes a mutual interaction showed better goodness of fit than the Model 1 does that hypothesizes no relationship at all between the variables. Model 2 and model 3 have identical values in terms of chi-squared statistics, degrees of freedom and goodness of fit.
In both Model 2 and Model 3, the clarity of the performance objectives and reasonableness in the measurement and evaluation of performance among other elements of organizational performance management appeared to exert positive (+) influence on the performance of individual public servants, while the utilization of the evaluation results appeared to have a negative (-) relationship. Such results suggest that the performance management system such as performance rating and promotion based on performance assessment that are generally positively regarded may not in fact have a positive effect on public servant performance.
While the reasonableness in measurement and evaluation of performance showed a negative effect on organizational commitment, the size of the effect was not sufficiently material so as to give a statistical significance. In the Model 2, the clarity of organizational performance objectives did not have a statistically significant effect on job involvement. The Model 3 the variables of organizational commitment and job involvement did not have statistically significant effect on the relationship between the effect of reasonableness in the performance measurement and evaluation and performance of individual public servants.
As for the results of Sobel test on the Model 1, whereas the intervening effect of organizational commitment on the relationship between organizational performance management and performance of individual public servant was statistically significant, the reasonableness in the measurement and evaluation of performance did not show statistically significant effect. In the case of Model 2, the mediating variable of job involvement did not exert a statistically significant effect on the effects the variables of clarity of performance goals and reasonableness in performance measurement and evaluation have on the performance of individual civil servants. In the case of Model 3, both mediating variables, organizational commitment and individual job involvement, did not have statistically significant effect on the relationship between the organizational performance management and performance of individual public employees.
Further, a multiple clustering analysis showed that the effects of reasonableness in the measurement and evaluation of performance on organizational commitment and the effects of clarity in the performance objectives on job involvement were in different directions among different levels of public servants. Although certain regression factors lack statistical significance, the reasonableness in the measurement and evaluation of performance had a negative influence on organizational commitment among high level public servants while it had a positive influence among lower-level public servants. Moreover, the effects of performance objectives on job engagement was greater among lower-level public servants than among high-level public servants.
Comparison of government organizational performance assessment amongst groups of different gender, public sector experience and government performance evaluation was restricted due to lack of measurement equivalence. Yet, analysis of government performance evaluation per different levels revealed that the effects of reasonableness in the measurement and evaluation of performance on job involvement was greater in civil servants belonging to a group that received unsatisfactory rating than those belonging to an organization with a satisfactory rating.
In sum, in that the effects of performance objectives and measurement and evaluation of performance on the mediating variables differ depending on the level of public servants, such finding must be considered a factor that can incentivize public servants in designing a performance management system. Further, the results of government performance evaluation analysis was statistically significant only for the difference between the group with unsatisfactory rating and the group with unsatisfactory rating, with greater effects on the group with unsatisfactory rating.
The fact that the use of performance evaluation results can have a negative influence on the performance of individual civil servants is in line with warnings raised by scholars about the side effects of introducing performance management system. The results of this study are as follows. Park Kyeong Won has pointed that organizational performance management can lead to inadvertent side effects driven by internal bureaucratism, lack of innovation, diminished system and process accountability, tunnel vision, quasi-optimization, and the fixation of performance parameters (Park, 2011: 78).