High-Performance Government

Governments have always been interested in performance and how to improve it, and this topic has drawn considerable attention from scholars and practitioners. Considerable efforts go into addressing the performance puzzle with major programs of reform, for example, developed to drive performance improvement. Since the 2000s, the notion of high-performance government has developed to express these aspirations. Rooted in management literature that has focused mostly on high-performance organizations, this perspective focuses on sustained superior performance that is driven by specific high-performance characteristics. As this idea migrated to the public sector, distinctly discursive and conceptual approaches have developed; both approaches, however, remain underdeveloped. Future research in this area should focus on better defining the key components and ensuring that important aspects of high performance are incorporated into models.