Bounded rationality, blame avoidance, and political accountability: how performance information influences management quality

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

“…The cognitive foundation for this evidence is that politicians are blame avoiders rather than credit claimants; policy makers are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid blame for negative policy outcomes rather than by the incentive to claim credit for positive ones (Weaver ; see also Hood ). This “blame avoidance” nature of politicians may be the result of voters' tendency to be more sensitive to losses than gains (Boyne et al ; Hong ; Hong, Kim, and Son ; James and John ; Olsen ; Weaver ). As Weaver (, 373) puts it, “Persons who have suffered losses are more likely to notice the loss, to feel aggrieved and to act on that grievance, than gainers are to act on the basis of their improved state.” Studies in various disciplines have provided support for this psychological trait of individuals (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky ).…”

“…An important inference from the discussion of negativity bias is that political principals will normally try to find a set of performance outcomes that are “good enough” and that satisfy a minimal acceptability criterion rather than search for the best ones (e.g., Battaglio et al ; Bellé, Cantarelli, and Belardinelli ; Hong ; Hong et al ). They will have a strong incentive to exclude a potential appointee with poor performance from the list of candidates, but once performance exceeds a certain threshold, the rewards for further improvement in performance become substantially lower.…”

Performance Management Meets Red Tape: Bounded Rationality, Negativity Bias, and Resource Dependence

“…Studies have shown that public managers’ use of performance information is positively affected by administrative stability (Askim, Johnsen, and Christophersen 2007), bureaucratic competence (Bourdeaux and Chikoto 2008), public service motivation (Moynihan and Pandey 2010), institutionalization of performance measurements (Dimitrijevska‐Markoski and French 2019), and authority over organizational resources (Julnes and Holzer 2001; Moynihan and Landuyt 2009), to name a few. On the other hand, research has also demonstrated that external stakeholders, including politicians and voters, place more weight on negative than positive performance information (James and John 2007; Boyne et al 2009; James and Moseley 2014; Olsen 2015; Nielsen and Moynihan 2017; Hong and Kim 2019; Hong et al 2019). This “negativity bias” may be caused by the greater psychological intensity of negative information (Lau 1982) or the process of attributing responsibility to public managers (Nielsen and Moynihan 2017).…”

“…The underlying assumption is that organizations are more likely to be “satisficed” when they receive positive rather than negative performance feedback. This asymmetric response to positive and negative performance feedback (i.e., greater response to negative feedback) is often referred to as the negativity bias in the use of performance information (Hong 2019; Hong and Kim 2019; Meier, Favero, and Zhu 2015; Nicholson‐Crotty, Nicholson‐Crotty, and Fernandez 2017;). Hereafter, we call this the negativity bias hypothesis .…”

“…1 1 1.Past evidence tends to support the view that social aspiration is far more relevant than historical aspiration in both private organizations (e.g., Mishina et al 2010) and the public sector (Charbonneau and Van Ryzin 2015; Hong 2019; Hong and Kim 2019; Hong et al 2019; Olsen 2017; Salge 2011). …”