People Management and Service Performance in Elderly Homes.

In this paper we present context-specific measures of care performance in elderly homes and the related employee behavior. The paper argues theoretically that context-specific measures are important because they capture the mission of organizations in a sector. They add to the current body of literature, in which mainly generic performance measures are used. Moreover, we contribute to the public management and HRM literature by examining how supervisors' people management activities impact on employees' behavior and ultimately on public service performance. Using a mixed methods approach, we show that thoughtful care is a valid context-specific measure of quality of care in elderly homes and that employees' in-role behavior needed to provide this type of care consists of the following three dimensions: paying attention, showing respect and treating each client as an individual person. The results of our study also provide support for the hypothesis that line managers' people management activities have a positive effect on thoughtful care performance in elderly homes though care workers' in-role behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]