Engineering resilience in a prison's performance management system

Abstract

While organisations are becoming more complex than ever, their applied performance management (PM) systems are still based on the conventional PM approach, derived from the need for control and accountability. On the other hand, turbulent changes, growing interdependencies across organisations, and increasing uncertainty have created challenges beyond the boundaries of traditional approaches. This study explores how principles and methods from the resilience engineering (RE) field can be applied to improve organisations' adaptive capacity in the sense that they anticipate, recognise, adapt to and absorb external or internal disturbances. By discussing features of different components of PM systems and ideas in RE, we provide a framework that links the elements of a PM system and the main features of RE at the cultural, strategic, and operational levels. The approach is instantiated and validated in the context of correctional service institutes, focusing on both security threats and related safety implications for staff and other inmates. We use a Norwegian prison as a case study and apply the proposed framework to assess the institute's resilience potentials.