This is the post print version of Mads Leth Felsager Jakobsen, Martin Baekgaard, Donald P. Moynihan and Nina Van Loon (forthcoming): "Making sense of Performance Regimes: Rebalancing External Accountability and Internal Learning", Perspectives on Public Management and Governance.

The claim that perceived organizational red tape hampers public services has become a central theme in public administration research. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have empirically examined the impact of perceived red tape on organizational performance. This article empirically analyzes how perceived organizational red tape among managers and frontline staff relates to objectively measured performance. The data consist of survey responses from teachers and principals at Danish upper secondary schools combined with grade‐level administrative performance data. Based on theories of red tape and motivation crowding, the authors hypothesize that perceived organizational red tape reduces performance within such organizations. The empirical result is a small negative relationship between staff perception of red tape and performance and no relationship between manager‐perceived red tape and performance.

In terms of clinical procedures (to take the example used in this article, hip operations), both public and private organizations provide highly professionalized services. For this service type, our knowledge about ownership differences is sparse. To begin to fill this gap, we investigate how the ownership of hip clinics affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction. The comparison of private and public hip clinics is based on data from the Danish Hip Arthroplasty Register and the Danish Central Patient Register combined with 20 semi-structured interviews. We find that private clinics employ stronger individual financial incentives and try harder to increase the income/costs ratio than do public clinics. Private clinics optimize non-clinical factors such as waiting time much more than public clinics and have fewer complication-prone patients than public clinics. However, the clinical procedures are very similar in the two types of clinics. Private clinics do not achieve better clinical results, but patient satisfaction is nevertheless higher with private clinics. The implication is that ownership matters for highly professionalized services, but professionalism neutralizes some – but not all – ownership differences.

This article examines the relationship between transformational, transactional and empowering leadership and the innovative behavior of public sector employees. Instead of investigating their association individually, this article focuses on the interaction between different types of leadership. The analysis is based on a survey from one of Denmark's largest hospitals (n=1,647). The main result is that empowering leadership, which focuses on employee capacity, moderates the association between transformational leadership, which is directed at motivation, and innovative behavior. The findings emphasize the importance for scholars and practitioners of not only focusing on a single leadership style but understanding how they work in combination.

This article examines the impact of politics on governmental rule production. Traditionally, explanations of rule dynamics have focused on nonpolitical factors such as the self‐evolvement of rules, environmental factors, and decision maker attributes. This article develops a set of hypotheses about when, why, and how political factors shape changes in the stock of rules. Furthermore, we test these hypotheses on a unique, new data set based on all Danish primary legislation and administrative rules from 1989 to 2011 categorized into 20 different policy domains. The analysis shows that the traditional Weberian “rules breed rules” explanations must be supplemented with political explanations that take party ideology and changes in the political agenda into account. Moreover, the effect of political factors is indistinguishable across changes in primary laws and changes in administrative rules, a result that challenges the depiction of the latter rule‐making process as more or less disconnected from the political domain.

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts-Texas and Denmarkand a difference-indifferences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information

leadership, bureaucratization, and public sector innovation. He is currently heading a large research project exploring the effects of combining performance management with professional values and autonomy within public sector governance with an empirical focus on education and health care. He is also head of the professional master's degree program on public leadership at Aarhus University. Abstract: Th e doctrine of performance management has been promoted as an alternative to rule-based governance. Analyzing performance management as a system of rules, this article examines how performance management is adopted through rules. Th e question is examined based on a systematic counting and content coding of national rules within the domain of primary education in Denmark from 1989 to 2010. Contrary to the prescriptions of the performance management doctrine, the analysis shows a clear increase in the number of rules. Th is refl ects the creation of many new rules about performance measurement without a proportionate repeal of production rules constraining the autonomy of public service providers and their managers. Th e result is congruent with the expectations derived from the literature on rule dynamics, which emphasizes rules as the carriers of learning and interests. Th e article thereby demonstrates the utility of analyzing performance management as a system of rules.

Public performance regimes are bedeviled by a paradox: they must engage the specialized knowledge of professionals who often perceive those very regimes as a threat to their autonomy. The authors use a mixed-method analysis of performance management in Danish hospitals, with separate data for managers and frontline professionals, to offer two insights into this challenge. First, the study shows that managerial behavior-in the form of performance information use-matters to the way frontline professionals engage in goal-based learning. Second, it shows that the way managers use performance data matters. When managers use data in ways that reinforce the perception of performance management as an externally imposed tool of control, professionals withdraw effort. However, when managers use data in ways that solve organizational problems, professionals engage in goal-based learning. The threat to professional values that performance regimes pose can therefore be mitigated by managers using data in ways that complements those values. Evidence for Practice • To make performance regimes work, public managers must engage professional employees whose expertise provides insight into the causes behind organizational performance, as well as the levers to improve results. • This study of Danish hospitals shows that frontline hospital professionals are more engaged in goal-based learning if their managers use performance data for problem-solving. • Professionals are less likely to engage in goal-based learning when their managers use data for reward and control. • Professionals are wary of the threats of performance regimes even as political leaders want to make those regimes work: a compromise path for both groups is to commit to aligning performance regimes with professional values.