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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Enabling success: performance excellence

Telmar Hospital's executive team sets targets for waiting times, then finds that staff manipulate records to hit the figures while patient care quality falls. Which problem with performance measurement does this best illustrate?

This illustrates measure fixation causing dysfunctional behaviour. Staff concentrate on meeting the waiting time target and manipulate records, so the measure no longer reflects real performance and the underlying objective of patient care suffers.

  1. AMeasure fixation leading to dysfunctional behaviourCorrect
  2. BBenchmarking against the wrong comparator
  3. CLack of a lagging indicator
  4. DExcessive use of qualitative data

Explanation

Measure fixation occurs when people focus on hitting the metric rather than the underlying objective, so behaviour becomes dysfunctional and data is gamed. The case does not concern comparators, indicator timing or qualitative data. The remedy is a broader set of measures and controls over data integrity.

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