Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 6th Edition

CHAPTER SIXORGANIZATIONAL GOALS, EFFECTIVENESS, AND PERFORMANCE

Organizations are goal-directed, purposive entities, and their effectiveness in pursuing goals influences the quality of our lives and even our ability to survive. All research and theory on management and organizations concerns, at least implicitly, how an organization and the people in it can perform well by pursuing goals. This chapter presents major issues about goals and addresses the challenges people in organizations face in linking goals to performance. The discussion then turns to diverse and conflicting performance criteria that all organizations must pursue, but especially public organizations. Then the chapter describes models that researchers have developed to assess the effectiveness of organizations and reviews an extensive body of literature on strategies and practices that managers use to achieve high levels of performance.

In recent decades elected officials and reformers in many nations have concentrated on improving government agencies' pursuit of goals. Governments around the world have invested heavily in reforms that require government agencies to state goals and performance measures. The Governmental Performance and Results Act (GPRA) in the United States in 1993 mandated that federal agencies publish strategic plans that include goals and performance measures; the legislation was renewed in 2010. Starting in the 1980s and continuing today, officials in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, ...