How to foster collaborative performance management? Key factors in the US federal agencies

ABSTRACT

Public employees are urged to be tireless collaborators and skilled performance managers, but can they be both at the same time? We describe two approaches to collaborative performance management observed in the US federal performance system: interagency collaboration to achieve cross-agency goals, and intra-agency collaboration to achieve agency goals. We find that some factors that reinforce intra-agency collaboration – accountability to agency goals, investment in the agency performance system – fail to support, or even undercut, interagency collaboration. However, other factors – seniority, participation in goal-setting, and goal salience – can encourage both types of collaborative performance management.