Performance management, caseloads and the frontline provision of social services

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.