Monitoring
12.6 Gaming and other behavioural effects
By establishing a monitoring system, a new set of incentives are implemented. One should be very cautious, not only on the choice of focus, questions, indicators, and norms, but most importantly, attention should be paid to the distortion a monitoring system can create. When people know that their actions are being monitored, they may change their behaviours; for example, in focusing on reaching the set targets they may decide to reduce their efforts in other areas of their work (Van Dooren et al., 2015).
Once incentives are put in place, one cannot change the system easily. In fact, studies have shown that there is no back-to-normal; getting rid of a system results in a new reinterpretation of the rules. People will adapt their behaviours to the system with positive impacts and potentially negative impacts too. Furthermore, in the longer term, the performance system in place may lose its relevance due to the “performance target paradox”:
Behavioural effects, both functional and dysfunctional, lead to a clustering of performance around targets. Over time, indicators lose their ability to differentiate between high and low performers as organisations adjust their performance to align with the indicators. Meyer and Gupta (1994) refer to this phenomenon as the performance paradox (also highlighted by Van Thiel and Leeuw (2002)). We prefer the term performance target paradox because the effect described by Meyer and Gupta should be linked to how performance is measured rather than merely to the pursuit of performance in itself. (as cited in Van Dooren et al., 2025)
Finally, once a monitoring system is put in place and effectively used as a control or an accountability mechanism, some gamification can occur. It happened in the Province of Quebec when the Ministry of Health decided to monitor the patient’s length of stay and the number of stretchers in emergency rooms. Some hospitals felt unable to improve their numbers and decided to create side rooms where emergency patients were placed. As these locations were not considered part of the emergency room, this patient data was not compiled in the Ministry monitoring system. Scores improved, but not patients’ situations.
