Contest and Reform: The Problem of Effectiveness in Government Service Quality Award via Facebook Management
Don-Yun Chen, Shih-Wei Yang, Chi-Jung Lu
Abstract
Under the influence of the “New Public Management,” Taiwan’s government follows the example of the private sector to establish the “Government Service Quality Award.” But government agencies may put too much effort into winning the award instead of comprehensively improving service quality.
We took the “Government Service Quality Award” as an example to investigate whether the award mechanism actually benefits “Total Quality Management”. We looked at the Facebook Fan Pages of first-line service agencies, comparing the performance of four different groups, including “winners,” “nominees,” “participants,” and “non-participants” during different periods, including “before the award review,” “during the award review,” and “after the award review” using four criteria: “attention,” “degree of initiative,” “participation level,” and “spread.”
It was found that with the exception of “non-participants,” the other three groups had a better performance in the period “before the award review,” and returned to an average level in the periods “during awards review” and “after awards review.” That means although the award may help improve government service quality in the short term, government agencies do not have continued motivation to maintain and improve public service quality in the long term without continued performance reviews.
There are two major suggestions. First, there should be a mechanism to keep track of the effectiveness of “Government Service Quality Award”. Second, in terms of operating Facebook, the agencies should provide relevant training to show staffs how to operate Fan Pages effectively. Lastly, the agencies should invest resources and make operating Fan Pages one of the long-term organizational tasks.
Keywords: award mechanism, Government Service Quality Award, benchmarking, facebook fan pages, civic engagement