Performance management systems as driver of public administration improvement: a dream?

Recently the Italian Government required public administrations to manage organizational and individual performance and to implement pay for performance systems. Actually each Italian public administration has to adopt Performance Management Systems (PMS). The Reform recalls the New Public Management framework in several points even if there’s a great controversy in the literature concerning the effective implementation of PMS in public administrations: for some authors PMS would run well while for others they need an adaptation to the public context. In this scenario, we assess the design of PMS on the basis of the empirical evidence collected in an Italian public administration and we indentify which parts of the literature are consistent with the empirical results. Our aim is to contribute to knowledge base on performance management in public administrations through an action design research approach based on the empirical evidence collected in the design of a PMS in Italy.