A behavioural model of managerial performance information use: evidence from survey experiment in South Korea

There has been increased scholarly interest in behavioural perspectives on performance information use. However, limited information about how public managers process performance information is available. We performed a survey experiment focusing on a sample of public managers with the same job attributes and analysed the impacts of comparison type and performance gap on the assessment of performance information. Our findings reflect the fact that the cognitive processes of public managers using performance information are contingent on context – type of reference point, performance gap, and type of performance indicator – under performance regimes with strong external control.