Evaluating Executive Performance in the Public Sector

Abstract

The ability of a government organization to evaluate and reward executive performance is of critical importance if performance management systems are realistically expected to promote successful execution of the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. Government organizations must move away from evaluating performance based on equity, time in grade, personal attributes and effort (all inputs) and toward systems based on output, results, and outcome achievement. We provide a model that can be used to evaluate executive performance in government. The model allows executives to focus on what is important to their organization and customers, and ties their performance evaluations not only to the organization’s objectives, but to the importance of each objective; thus it gives leaders an open and explicit linkage between performance of the individual and organizational objectives. We measure individual achievement by defining results or measures of performance and then aggregating them into higher-level objectives. We discuss how to use the model to rank performance among executives, how the model results might be used to reward performance and limitations of using the model for performance evaluation.