People and Organisations: Principles and Practice in Global Contexts. Lecture 6. Managing Performance

What is the purpose of Performance Management?

 Performance management is a systematic process to improve any organizational performance. To do this, organizations should understand and manage their agreed goals or standards with the individual or team of employee performances (Armstrong, 2009).

The objective of performance management is to improve the capacity of employees to meet or exceed the expectations and to achieve their full potential to benefit themselves as well as to the organization (Armstrong, 2009).

There are three theories supports Performance management

1. Goal Theory – goals or targets will help employees to define priorities in terms of skills and motivation. These goals should have discussed with both management and employees to achieve good results. This is also called MBO theory (Management by Objective) where both management and workers agreed for asset standard which is set by workers, so the buy-in will remain to achieve the target (Pawar, 2017).
2. Control Theory – giving feedback to employees according to the actual to desired goals discrepancy. This will help employees to get into the right track if they deviated from the targets (Armstrong, 2017).
3. Social cognitive theory – give them the self-confidence to employees, that you achieve your target or goals (Bandura, 1989).

The purpose of performance management is to improve the performance of the employee. To do this organizations use performance appraisal. Appraisals used to make a goal, to make sure whether we are moving there and to take corrective actions. Most of the time people think, performance appraisal is a punishment, but it is not. Performance appraisal used to check if the people work towards achieving the goals.

In the Sri Lankan context, performance management is not happening everywhere. When it comes to teachers or lectures in schools or institutes, students never shared feedback and not try to criticize teachers. That has made more students with lower scores in the examinations.

In the manufacturing sectors, performance management is running well. We use the following performance evaluations,

• Daily review meetings – Team leaders and Group leaders follow up of daily production targets by an hourly base, follow-up daily absenteeism, customer quality by First Time Through (FTT) figures, Production down-time follow up, Executives and managers follow up Daily shipments schedule and Daily plant performance review by management
• Weekly review – Management weekly review on plant KPI performance and a Knowledge sharing with different subjects, Weekly plant projects review
• Monthly review – Management monthly plant KPI review
• Quarterly review – management quarterly plant KPI achievement meeting, Quarterly project review, Employee performance evaluation
• Yearly Review – Plant Hoshin review, Budget review

Even in Sri Lankan schools, education institutes and Universities, they have a monthly test, Term test, Year-end test to check if the students learn the subjects well.

If these types of evaluations not conducted, and the organization doesn’t know where it is heading and if its performance management conducted at the end of the year, no corrective action to be done too. Therefore Performance management is an important process and a system to achieve the organization and its employees set targets or goals.

References

Armstrong, M., 2009. Armstrong's Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. 11th ed. London: Kogan Page.

Armstrong, M., 2017. Armstrong on Reinventing Performance Management. 1 ed. London: Kogan Page.

Bandura, A., 1989. SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY. 6 ed. Greenwich: JAI Press.

Yatin Pawar, 2017. Understanding Locke and Latham’s 5 principles of goal-setting. [Online]
Available at: https://upraise.io/blog/locke-lathams-principles-goal-setting/
[Accessed 21 09 2019].