Public Value Accounting: Objective vs. Subjective Public Value Creation and Their Relationships to Customer Satisfaction.

More than 20 years ago, public value research asked for accounting measures aligned with de facto value creation of public organizations in society (Moore 1995). Public managers need to know where the value they create registers and how to best measure their accomplishments (Moore 1994, 297). However, public value measures have not yet been integrated into existing of performances measurement schemes (controlling data). More objective criteria are generally preferred to subjective measures. We argue that the objective and subjective parts of public value creation are two non-contradictory sides of the same coin of performance and de facto public value creation. Further, we examine differences in the subjective domain between subjective public value creation and customer satisfaction. Based on data from Germany’s Federal Labor Agency (FLA) and survey data with employers in 2012 and 2014, we show positive yet non-straightforward relationships between objective and subjective public value creation. At the agency level, subjective public value creation serves as a better predictor of objective performance than customer satisfaction. However, customer satisfaction is a better predictor of service use at the individual level. The article discusses how to further integrate subjective data in performance management in the public sector.