Performance management in a networked organization: the OECD

The article aims at improving the authors’ understanding on how international organizations function by shedding light on management reforms at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The article shows the characteristics of the performance management system implemented at the OECD, the main obstacles encountered, adaptations addressing the low measurability of policy advice activities and other issues.

While multilateral collaboration could be an effective way to contrast several wicked problems, the global actors face multiple legitimacy and financial challenges. This makes understanding the way they function of outmost importance. Unfortunately, public management and administration research, while steadily grown around the reform efforts of national governments, has neglected the global level. The article addresses this literature gap through the in-depth analysis of a case study aimed at exploring the unfamiliar international organizations context. It relies on two literature streams: performance management and network management. The collaborative nature of international organizations makes the latter particularly useful.

Among the various public administration types, international organizations providing policy advise display several features that make performance measurement more difficult. The OECD case study analysis offers several insights into other international institutions struggling with managerial reforms in an effort to address legitimacy and financial issues. It shows that implementing a performance management system is possible and necessary to sustain the support of member countries and ensure a well-functioning multilateral system.

The single case study offers only limited and analytical generalizability of the findings.

Research on international organizations could help to unveil implementation obstacles or undesired effects of management reforms in other coping and networked organizations.

The article investigates the OECD, which is one of the less studied among the many global multilateral institutions. Other original features include the adoption of a public management approach to the study international organizations and the focus on network performance, a recent topic in the network management literature.