And Let’s Start at the Top
Ken O'Brien
Let’s start today’s essay with a term with which many may not be familiar.
That term is goal congruence.
Put simply, what goal congruence means is that performance should be rewarded to the degree that it produces desired results.
It is the concept of goal congruence that underlies programs in business and government labeled as pay for performance.
Under pay for performance programs financial compensation is based in large part on meeting or exceeding measurable criteria. These criteria are related to the accepted mission of the organization’s sub-unit to which the employee belongs. Further, such criteria are related to the individual employee’s ability to affect those results.
Let’s look at a specific case of pay for performance in local government with which many readers are likely to be familiar.
