Structuring Performance: Performance Contracts, Organizational Logics, and Leadership in Welfare-to-Work Programs

This qualitative comparison of two welfare-to-work organizations, one private and for-profit, one nonprofit, examines the influence of state performance contracts on managers’ responses to welfare service provision and on clients’ employment outcomes. Despite organizational theories that suggest that the mandates of state performance contracts and state monitoring may prompt agencies to become increasingly similar to each other, this analysis finds that the differing organizational logics of for-profit and nonprofit service couple with the behaviors of managers to lead to starkly different organizational structures, processes, and client employment outcomes.