Addressing low performers has been an important issue for government. The purpose of this paper is to examine what practices of performance management are effective in reducing the proportion of low performers in the US federal government.,The authors conducted the binary logit regression analysis and multinomial regression analysis.,Analyzing the Merit Principle Survey 2016, the authors found that the dismissal of low performing employees and the formal performance improvement plan (PIP) is the most effective in reducing the proportion of low performers. To the contrary, the within-grade-increase did not have a significant influence on the proportion of low performers. Moreover, using the performance appraisal for the purpose of reassigning employees to the position that better match employees’ talent increased the number of low performers in work units.,Research limitations are as follows. First, the performance measure for this study was the percentage of employees rated as unsuccessful. Second, the pseudo-R2 indicated that the proposed model explained only the small, albeit significant, portion of the total variance in employee performance. Lastly, this study used a cross-sectional research design that may impede the validity of inference of causalities.,According to a recent news article (Rein, 2018), Trump signed an executive order that limits the stable benefits associated with government employment such as, limiting pay associated with union work and negotiating more stringent union contracts. These measures are largely aimed at eliminating low performing employees rather than attempting to improve their performances through carefully designed training programs. Although removing low performers may be an option, the results indicate that providing assistance in order to develop employee knowledge and skills through the PIP have a comparable impact on reducing low performers.,These findings imply that the use of performance evaluation for developmental or sanctioning purpose is more effective than reassignment or incentive purpose.

中文翻译：

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美国联邦政府绩效管理和绩效低下的做法

解决绩效低下的问题一直是政府的重要问题。本文的目的是研究绩效管理的哪些做法可以有效减少美国联邦政府中绩效低下的人员的比例。作者进行了二元logit回归分析和多项式回归分析。《 2016年绩效原则调查》，作者发现，解雇低绩效员工和正式的绩效改善计划（PIP）是减少低绩效员工比例最有效的方法。相反，年级增长对低绩效者的比例没有显着影响。此外，使用绩效评估的目的是将员工重新分配到与员工的才能更好地匹配的职位上，从而增加了工作单位中低绩效员工的数量。研究限制如下。首先，这项研究的绩效指标是被评定为不成功的员工百分比。其次，伪R2表示，所提出的模型仅解释了员工绩效总体差异中很小的部分，尽管意义重大。最后，这项研究使用了横断面研究设计，这可能会阻碍因果关系推断的有效性。根据最近的新闻报道（Rein，2018），特朗普签署了一项行政命令，限制了与政府就业相关的稳定福利，例如，限制与工会工作有关的工资，并谈判更严格的工会合同。这些措施主要是为了淘汰表现不佳的员工，而不是试图通过精心设计的培训计划来提高他们的绩效。尽管可以删除绩效低下的员工，但结果表明，通过PIP提供帮助以发展员工的知识和技能对降低绩效低下的员工具有可比的影响。这些发现表明，将绩效评估用于发展或制裁目的比调任或激励目的更有效。