domingo, abril 07, 2024

Indicadores, propaganda e realidade.

O trecho que se segue foi retirado de "Organizational Control Systems and Pay-for-Performance in the Public Service":

"If output based control and reward systems are applied although the task does not display the prerequisites for output control, dysfunctional effects may arise. Individuals who are not intrinsically motivated will have a strong incentive to respond to those indicators that are easy to measure, that is, the quantifiable performance-related aspects of a task. Data that is not easy to measure is disregarded, although it might be crucial to fulfilling the task. The reliance on quantitative criteria to govern work behaviour neglects the more important qualitative aspects of public services. LeGrand (2010, p. 63), for example, mentions ambulances that concentrated on dealing with emergencies a short distance away so as to meet the goal to respond within eight minutes. They ‘hit the target and miss the point’.

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For example, Fehr and Schmidt (2004) show that output-dependent financial incentives lead to the neglect of non-contractible tasks. An example in public service is teachers responding with ‘teaching to the test’ when they are assessed according to quotas of students who pass a certain exam. Dalrymple (2001) presents an illustrative example. French police officers decided not to investigate a robbery. The robbery would have increased their district’s crime rate that in turn would have cancelled the officers’ end-of-year bonuses. Other examples are chronically ill patients excluded from healthcare, teachers responding to evaluations by excluding bad pupils from tests (for empirical evidence in the US see Figlio & Getzler, 2002) or putting lower quality students in special classes that are not included in the measurement sample. In the academic field, an example is the ‘slicing strategy’ whereby scholars divide their research results into as many papers as possible to enlarge their publication list. These effects contribute to what is called the ‘performance paradox’, namely the fact that performance measures have the tendency to ultimately lose their ability to discriminate between good, average, and bad performance. This explains evidence suggesting that in spite of more sophisticated tools for output measurement performance has not improved."

O trecho que se segue foi retirado de "Numbers Speak for Themselves, or Do They? On Performance Measurement and Its Implications":

"The second decade of the 21st century was an extraordinary successful one for crime fighters in the Netherlands. Various high-impact crimes went down spectacularly, home burglaries dropped, for instance, from 91,930 in 2012 to 42,798 six years later. "I look back with pride at the achieved results," the responsible Dutch minister stated, celebrating the police's efforts.- His pride was supported by convincing numbers. And the numbers speak for themselves. Or do they?

A collective of investigative journalists scrutinized the "making" of these crime figures and found that there was more going on.? The number of high-impact crimes was used as a key indicator to measure the "performance" of police units. To appear better, some eager superiors pressured subordinates to suppress this number. For instance, when burglars broke a window and searched a home for valuable items but eventually did not steal anything, this could be classified as a case of destruction (a low-impact crime) instead of home burglary (a high-impact crime), improving the indicator for high-impact crimes."

Assim como este outro:

"treat indicators of performance never as the “end” of a conversation, but always as the beginning of one. When a performance measurement system is used as a platform to start dialogue about what matters, this can produce various positive outcomes." 

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