Administrative or survey data for measuring organizational performance: what's the difference?

Abstract

Debate about the best way to measure performance in studies of management in public organizations is longstanding. We address this topic through a review of the evidence from 93 studies that use administrative and/or survey measures of organizational performance. We find that administrative data typically reflect the performance judgements of government (at the central, regional and local level) and regulators, while survey data is based on the perceptions of citizens, service users and public sector managers. We undertake a critical review of the twelve articles that use both administrative and survey measures of organizational performance. This reveals limited differences in the impact of management variables on the two types of performance measures. However, in those studies using survey measures, management variables are more likely to have a positive link with the performance judgements of service consumers than the judgements of managers themselves. This implies that public managers may underestimate their impact on citizens’ perceptions of organizational performance.