The failure of management innovations in the Italian central government - ‘Making sense’ of performance-based rewards

An international trend of reform has led industrialized countries to review public sector’s procedures and structures to attain higher levels of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. Accordingly, in Italy, several statutory requirements promoted the use of business management techniques in the public sector. However, such reforms often led only to a formal adoption, without any real impact on processes and decisions The article aims at understanding which factors inhibit the use of management techniques within the public sector, acknowledging that different actors intervene at various stages of a change process embedded in the equivocal and fuzzy context of public sector reform. Using a multiple case study approach, the article points out the ambiguity of statutory requirements claiming for management innovations and investigates how different group of actors ‘make sense’ of them, admist ambiguity. The paper shows that the uptake of a new technique is not only a matter of technical change management or conformity to external pressures, but above all an issue of internal organisational understanding, alignment and acceptance of a transformation project, where the usefulness of each single component, ranging from organizational setting principles to the scope of specific management techniques, has to be recognized, shared and clearly communicated.