The problem with performance measurement in non-profits is also not due to any inherent difficulty in the measurement of the value of what non-profits produce or consume. Many for- profit firms produce highly intangible goods and services (think about sports cars, fashion items, or legal services) whose intrinsic value is very difficult to measure. The difference between the for-profits (for example, law firms) and the non-profits (for example, school systems) is that the non-profits rarely
论文网http://www.youerw.com/ sells all their outputs on markets (they often give away or subsidize their services), and often acquire key inputs from non-market sources (that is, they hire volunteers, or receive tax funding or charitable donations). What this means is that the decentralized value assessments that are generally performed by market participants customers deciding what a product is worth, suppliers deciding what an input is worth are disabled by the fact that non-profits engage in only limited market transactions. This means that their revenues may not accurately measure the value of what they produce, and their costs may not accurately measure the value of what they consume. Thus, the available performance measures are distorted with respect to the true value that the organization creates, in a way that they are not for for-profit enterprises.
This analysis suggests some important insights about the design of incentive programs in non-profit organizations. First, when these organizations do engage in market-based activities, they should be evaluated on the basis of traditional (for profit) performance measures. An example of this arose in the early 1980s within Harvard University. The University decided to consolidate all of its non-academic property and place it in a separate organizational unit Harvard Real Estate (HRE) that would manage this property more like a for-profit landlord, charging market rental rates, properly maintaining the properties to ensure that they could charge these rates, and generally managing the properties to maximize the return to the University from these assets. All of the commercial and residential property of the University was thus collected together and managed in this way. Issues of housing subsidies (for graduate students or recruited faculty) were handled by the unit in the university that wanted to grant the subsidy (the financial aid office for students, the recruiting department for faculty). As a result of this reorganization, HRE was given a clear and reasonably undistorted performance measure, and was thus able to provide incentives to its employees to manage Harvard's non-academic property in a value maximizing way. 本文来自优.文~论^文·网原文请找腾讯324-9114
A second insight about incentive provision in non-profits arises from the fact that, because these organizations so often lack undistorted performance measures, they are generally characterized by (optimally) weak incentives. For this reason, employee's intrinsic motivations and personal reasons for working at these organizations loom large in their choices about what actions they will take. Indeed, because these firms cannot use strong explicit incentives, they will tend to select employees who have strong preferences for the type of work in which the organization engages. This has implications for how incentive designers should use the limited incentive instruments that they have. An example of this arises in the performance standards system implemented at the JTPA (discussed earlier). The JTPA's objective is to improve the training and employability of the disadvantaged. In a 1996 paper, Heckman, Smith and Taber cite evidence that less disadvantaged clients may benefit more from the offered job training than do the most disadvantaged. But the employees who work at the centers have preferences to help the most disadvantaged. Thus, they will have a tendency to want to serve those who may get less out of the program. Heckman et al. argue that the performance standards, which encourage cream skimming, may thus actually increase the value added of the program by giving JTPA center employees an incentive to attract clients who will benefit more. Thus a distortionary performance measurement system is combined with a system that allows employees to (inefficiently) indulge their preferences to generate more valuable outcomes.
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