Pay-for-Performance Systems in State Government: Perceptions of State Agency Personnel Managers*

Pay for performance has been a widely used method of compensation in the public sector since the early 1980s, but a growing body of research has indicated that numerous problems can be associated with the application of performance-based compensation systems In late 1993, the federal government, after years of difficulty experienced with its merit pay program, took a significant step back from pay for performance through passage of the Performance Management and Recognition System Termination Act This research seeks to determine whether state governments are becoming similarly disenchanted with pay for performance To gain insight into this question, a survey was administered to a nationwide random sample of state agency personnel management executives Results indicate that pay for performance remains as popular as ever in state government, and that nearly all of the systems in the states utilize merit pay despite difficulties often associated with that approach to pay for performance.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ISSUE: The Rise and Decline of Affairmative action

This article examines the development of the affirmative action issue since its inception, and compares its dynamics and evolution with the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It identifies and discusses three periods or phases of the affirmative action regime. This vein of research helps provide at least a partial explanation for why policies in related areas of civil rights may produce different outcomes, and explicates the broad resistance to key elements of the anti-discrimination effort of the last three decades. A tentative model based on the congruence of the policy stance of political institutions to public opinion is suggested. We conclude that while issues such as affirmative action may be susceptible to long-run institutional counter pressures, voluntary programs to increase diversity will certainly continue. Copyright 2000 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Motivation crowding and the federal civil servant: Evidence from the U.S. internal revenue service

Pay-for-performance reforms create “high-powered” incentives for civil servants to meet or exceed specified performance objectives as measured by such things as customer satisfaction. Economists and social psychologists have advanced the claim that high-powered incentives for performance may empirically lessen the effect of civil servants' intrinsic motivation toward achieving agency goals (motivation can be “crowded out”). Nonetheless, well-designed pay-for-performance incentives may “crowd in” intrinsic motivation. A number of federal agencies and subagencies have undergone personnel management reforms that raise the specter of this pattern of “motivation crowding.” Does it happen? Is intrinsic motivation crowded in or crowded out? This paper employs item response theory to create measurement models for the estimation a latent trait of intrinsic motivation for employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The IRS, but not the OCC, implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not on non-supervisory personnel. Results suggest that the IRS reward structure crowded in intrinsic motivation at the lowest levels, but that at the highest levels of motivation intrinsic motivation is crowded out, a pattern not seen in the OCC data