Cascading Performance Indicators in Local Government: The Unexamined Act of Decomposition

Abstract

Public organisations routinely translate a strategic outcome into tiered indicators assigned down an organisational hierarchy, and Indonesian local government does so through a mandated instrument known as the performance tree. This study establishes that the act of decomposition itself is almost entirely unexamined, and proposes a framework for examining it. The method combines a structured review of research published between 2017 and 2024 with a targeted search of the Indonesian literature and a conceptual analysis of the decomposition step. Two absences are documented. Internationally, the literature theorises the consequences of decomposed indicator systems extensively — gaming, goal displacement, ambiguity, ritualistic use — while almost never theorising the decomposition itself; no located study takes cascading as its object. Domestically, a dedicated search located no peer-reviewed empirical or theoretical scholarship on the Indonesian performance tree, despite a substantial government and practitioner documentation footprint. The conceptual contribution identifies three losses that decomposition necessarily incurs: attribution loss, since an outcome depends on causes outside any single unit; ambiguity transfer, since ambiguity in an upper-tier goal is documented as impossible to eliminate and goal ambiguity predicts distortive behaviour; and the conversion of enabling control into coercive control as an indicator descends a hierarchy. The argument is deliberately balanced against evidence that formal strategic planning has a positive moderate effect on performance and that a causally identified study found no gaming increase where one was predicted.