"Goals and Governance, Complements or Substitutes?: Performance in a Government Organization"

We investigate the antecedents of organizational performance by considering the influence of goals and governance. We build our arguments following an attention-based perspective using the mechanism of attention-motivation-action. Specifically, we hypothesize a linear relationship regarding goal importance and a curvilinear relationship regarding the degree of formalization of operational-level governance. Most importantly, we hypothesize goal importance and operational-level governance formalization exhibit joint effects. We test our model on 348 Information Technology project managers and system developers in a large multi-unit government organization. We find that goal importance and governance formalization are substitutes in the condition of low to moderate governance formalization, and are complements in the condition of moderate to high governance formalization. Our provocative findings contribute to the organizational goals and operational governance literatures.