The emergence of New Public Management (NPM) phenomenon creates a new discourse that attracts the attention of human resource management experts around the world, especially in Indonesia. To address this issue, this study tries to focus on how the performance of local government employees is influenced by several factors; namely, intelligence, leadership, quality of human resources, and NPM itself. The population of this study is government employees in the city of Makassar, Indonesia, and given the huge number, the sampling technique uses purposive sampling. The amount determined referred to the variance-based (or Partial Least Square) Structural Equation Analysis tool and obtained by 100 local government employees. Primary data collected through a questionnaire is processed with the assistant of Smart PLS. The results show that intelligence, leadership, and HR quality had positive and significant ef-fects on NPM. The direct relationship also indicates the significance of constructs on performance, except intelligence, which directly has no significant impact on the performance of government employees. The NPM variable also significantly mediates the indirect effect between variables. This research is expected to enrich the treasury of knowledge in the field of human resource studies, and strategies for implementing the concept of NPM in the government environment.