Unlocking politicians’ potential: what fosters purposeful use of performance information in support of voice?

ABSTRACT

Pivotal for decision making quality in representative governing boards of local authorities is that performance information is used in a purposeful way by its members to challenge the status quo and express constructive changes in support of collective learning (i.e., voice). However, despite the presumed importance of purposeful use of performance information and voice, empirical insights on the relationship between both constructs as well as the motivational mechanisms fostering voice are limited. To address this omission, we build on motivated information processing theory and develop a model that includes a person-based and situation-based pathway. Data from 520 politicians populating the representative governing boards of 242 local authorities in Belgium are used to test the developed model. Results indicate that the studied drivers help explain the detected variance in purposeful use of performance information and voice, but that the role of individual antecedents like public service motivation and open-mindedness is predominant.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance information use
• voice
• motivated information processing
• politicians
• Decision-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2023.2198216.

Notes

1. From here PI-use refers to the purposeful use of PI.

2. One additional reason for not focusing on passive or perverse means is that these means have a negative connotation, raising concerns for social desirability bias (Moynihan, Pandey, and Wright 2012a).

3. PI-use scores are in line with earlier work (e.g., Bjørnholt, Bækgaard, and Houlberg 2016; George et al. 2020; Korac et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds [BOF.PDO.2021.0046.01 - BOF21/PDO/053].