IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cid/wpfacu/409.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Managing for Motivation as Public Performance Improvement Strategy in Education & Far Beyond

Author

Listed:
  • Dan Honig

    (University College London)

Abstract

People management has an important role to play in improving public agency performance. This paper argues that a ‘Route Y’ managerial approach focused on supporting the empowered exercise of employee judgment will in many circumstances prove superior to conventional reform approaches steeped in ‘Route X’ monitoring and incentives. Returns to Route Y are greater when employees are or can become more “mission motivated” – that is, aligned with the goals of the agency in the absence of monitoring and extrinsic incentives. Returns to Route Y are also greater when monitoring is incomplete or otherwise likely to unproductively distort effort, thus lowering the returns to using performance-linked rewards and penalties. I argue that education systems are one (but far from the only) setting where Route Y is a lever worth focusing on in efforts to improve public performance in the developed and developing world alike.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan Honig, 2022. "Managing for Motivation as Public Performance Improvement Strategy in Education & Far Beyond," CID Working Papers 409, Center for International Development at Harvard University.
  • Handle: RePEc:cid:wpfacu:409
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bsc.cid.harvard.edu/files/bsc/files/2022-03-cid-wp-409-managing-for-motivation.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mundy, Karen, 2023. "SDG4 and state capacity: The missing link," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    2. Stefan Dercon, 2023. "The Political Economy of Economic Policy Advice," CSAE Working Paper Series 2023-09, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    people management; public policy;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cid:wpfacu:409. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chuck McKenney (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ciharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.