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The potential of increasing effectiveness and efficiency via performance measurement practices seems clear for scholars and practitioners alike. At the same time, it is often argued that quantitative performance measures fail to do justice to the complex environment of public sector organizations. This paper takes a first step toward incorporating and operationalizing cognitive dissonance theory to make sense of the different beliefs that public workers hold regarding performance measurement practices that are inspired by the New Public Management movement. We analyze a dataset of 34 interviews with employees working in policy departments, and we identify various indications of cognitive dissonance regarding the use of performance measurement at the individual level. Furthermore, we find that employees aim to reduce this dissonance by changing their behavior and by avoiding tasks that do not yield quantifiable results. This paper contributes to the management control literature by exploring how individuals with complex tasks respond to performance measurement practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]