Performance management, caseloads and the frontline provision of social services

Abstract

Caseloads and performance management are important working conditions of workers delivering public social services in street-level organizations. The literature on these working conditions argues that high caseloads and performance management have considerable consequences for workers’ performance in terms of the quality of services they provide and the results they realize. This article empirically investigates and compares these consequences, drawing on the results of a quantitative study of frontline workers in 14 local welfare agencies in the Netherlands. These workers are responsible for the delivery of welfare-to-work policies to social assistance recipients. The findings show that high caseloads do, indeed, have a detrimental effect on workers’ performance, whereas the impact of performance management is more modest, though confirming some of the findings reported in other studies on performance management. The results also show that by focusing service provision on a proportion of their caseload, workers are able to reduce the negative impact of high caseloads somewhat. Overall, the article finds that the negative impact of high caseloads is more pervasive than that of performance management. The article concludes that the recent focus in the literature on performance management and its consequences for public services should not turn scholars’ attention away from the ‘traditional’ public administration problem of high caseload sizes.