Abstract

The complexity, variety, and quality of public service delivery challenged by scarcity of resources have become a major public concern in recent years. As a result, scholars and practitioners in the field of public administration are becoming increasingly concerned about performance evaluation and performance improvement in public-sector agencies. The traditional methods used in public-service agencies to ensure effective and efficient performance have proved to be inappropriate in such a changing unpredictable environment.

This study focuses on one controversial issue: the issue of assessing the performance of public-service agencies, quantitatively, to determine the extent of fulfilling organizational goals in order to enhance accountability. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how to investigate and improve the public administrator's performance in a systematic way that is easy to understand and implement while maintaining a positive attitude toward the evaluation process.

A universally accepted criterion to assess police productivity has not been established. Any police department is a public service agency that delivers public goods and services, and the assessment of its performance has been controversial.

To shed light on this dilemma, the Public Security of Jordan-as a public-service agency—was chosen for analysis purposes. This dissertation utilizes the case-study approach. It represents a two-year exhaustive case study of the Public Security of Jordan. It investigates the performance of seventy-two (72) police departments over two-year period (1996–1997) to determine their productivity levels, and ways of improving these levels. This study uses a two-step analysis approach: the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess the organizational factors and their respective impact on productivity levels, and the Cross-sectional Regression analysis to utilize the productivity levels obtained from the DEA method and further the investigation and assessment of the impact of environmental factors on these productivity levels as well.

Even though the results obtained in this study pertain to the Public Security of Jordan, the emphasis is on the applicability of the methodology utilized and the logic of analysis for wider application in public-sector agencies in general.