Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that citizens evaluate government performance much differently when equivalent performance information is presented with either a positive or negative framing. For example, Olsen (2015a) found that presenting citizens in Denmark with a patient dissatisfaction measure led to more negative views of public hospitals than exposing them to a logically equivalent satisfaction metric. But do experienced public managers, evaluating performance information, also suffer from this same kind of framing effect? To address this question, we conducted an experiment with 170 public service professionals in the U.S. in which we experimentally varied the framing of performance information about customer satisfaction, job satisfaction and goal achievement for various federal government agencies. Our results show that experienced public service professionals—just like ordinary citizens—are susceptible to framing effects. Specifically, the professionals in our study tend to evaluate federal agency performance more negatively when percentages of “job dissatisfaction” and “targets not met” were presented, in contrast to logically equivalent percentages of “job satisfaction” and “targets met”. We found less bias in the interpretation of customer dissatisfaction/satisfaction percentages, although the trend in the findings still suggests a framing effect. These results provide a deeper understanding not only about the effective use of performance information in public management, but also how performance information is comprehended and perhaps misunderstood by decision makers.