This symposium about public performance features three articles that approach public performance from three quite different vantage points. In “Organizational size and public service performance: a meta-analysis and an agenda for future research”, Richard Walker, Rhys Andrews, Bert George and Xuan Tu conduct a meta-analysis to rekindle research about organisational size and performance. Drawing upon a sample of 45 articles, encompassing 122 effect sizes, the authors confirm that most linear, direct relationships between organisational size and public service performance are null. They propose examining nonlinear and contingent relationships as a viable alternative to traditional expectations about size-performance relationships.
Although organisational size-performance relationships have garnered attention from public administration scholars for many years, the effects of COVID-19 on employee productivity has not been studied because of its recency. In “COVID-19 and employee productivity in the public sector”, Hyesong Ha, Aarthi Raghaven and Mehmet Akif Demircioglu seek to fill this gap using 2020 responses from the Australian public service. They examine how five practices affected employee productivity: managerial support, managerial proactiveness, team adaption, team effort, and organisational adaptation. They find a mix of positive and negative effects associated with employee productivity in the Australian public service. Their results deserve replication in other countries to identify whether particular practices are associated with similar outcomes elsewhere.
The third article in this symposium, “Open or shut case? Exploring the role of openness in public sector innovation”, again shifts focus by examining another influence on public performance. Shaleen Khanal examines how openness of public organisations influence innovation. Khanal’s examination begins with the premise that declining budgets, increasing demands for participation and growing complexity of social problems are leading public sector employees towards greater openness to external influences. The article seeks to fill a gap in what is known about external influences on innovation processes in the public sector and their effects on innovation outcomes. The findings suggest that openness is associated with positive organisational returns, which selectively affect product or service innovations rather than organisational processes.