Although negative performance in public organizations is perceived as having relatively greater saliency and attention than positive performance, there has been little formal attention to negative performance management. By focusing on the negative performance of both individual employees and organizations, this study seeks to answer under what conditions government organizations can better manage their performance. Specifically, this dissertation is comprised of three empirical individual chapters that investigate the following questions: first, the underlying causes of differences in supervisors’ perception of the effectiveness of the Performance Improvement Period (PIP); second, the role of administrative leaders in the magnitude of payment errors; and finally, the impact of administrative leader types on the direction of payment errors. Several key findings of this dissertation include the following. In the first empirical chapter, the results demonstrate that the validity and usefulness of performance standards and organizational support have a direct positive impact on the perceived effectiveness of the PIP, as well as an indirect effect through the influence on the confidence in delivering performance feedback. The analysis also supports that supervisors’ authority to remove poor performers also positively affects the perceived effectiveness of the PIP. For the second empirical chapter, the findings suggest that programs administered by career executives or non-acting executives produce lower total payment errors than programs administered by political executives or acting executives. Finally, the third empirical chapter further investigates payment errors by separately analyzing overpayment and underpayment errors. The results indicate that career executives are better suited for managing both overpayment and underpayment errors which are potentially competing performance goals. These three empirical chapters provide helpful information about when supervisors are more or less willing to use the tool for managing poor-performing employees and under which administrative leader types better manage program payment errors.
