The perceived managerial discretion : a methodological perspective

In the healthcare sector, the link between performance and outcomes is at best tenuous. Consequently, researchers have been called to move beyond activitybased performance and adopt quality and outcomebased measures. Most of the studies in this field have focused on the measurement of outcomes for either patients or wider society, while not exploring these for managers in the healthcare field. We therefore grounded our methodological note on the performance management literature and investigated the measurement of perceived managerial discretion. Our research aims to validate the perceived managerial discretion construct through confirmatory factor analysis of the data provided by 97 Italian healthcare managers. A principal component analysis's results indicate that two items in three performance management mechanisms are sufficient to measure the perceived managerial discretion. [Publisher's text].