Dealing with Knowledge in the Public Sector: the Role of Performance Management Systems in the Italian University System

Purpose - This article aims at investigate the relationship between Performance Management Systems and knowledge in Public Organizations. We particularly intend to examine this relationships in the vast domain of Italian Public Universities, verifying how different control choices affect the nature of knowledge, in terms of the well-known dichotomy tacit vs. explicit Design/methodology/approach - This article proposes an analysis of the Italian public reform focusing on a research conducted on 15 Performance Management Systems that universities should implement in accordance with the reform itself. Within the overall total of 47 Italian state universities, those cases examined in the empirical study were singled out by using three successive steps. Originality/value - Our paper faces a topic neglected in the knowledge management literature, trying to open up a discussion on the possible interconnections between Performance Management Systems and knowledge in a public arena. Practical implications - Our results show how Performance Management Systems (in the different forms presented in the universities evaluation plans) could represent an important social tool to facilitate the management of organizational knowledge, combining explicit and tacit forms of knowledge.