Performance management and accountability of welfare state agencies. The cases of Norwegian hospital, welfare and immigration administration

Abstract

This paper examines how administrative and managerial accountability are balanced in public sector performance management systems and how the formal affiliation between ministry and agency, and agency tasks affect this balance. The empirical base is a study of the management‐by‐objective‐and result arrangement in five Norwegian welfare state agencies. The paper reveals that there is not a tight coupling between the performance manage performance management model and how it works in practice; that there is a complex relationship between and administrative and managerial accountability and that performance management system is dependent on organizational factors.