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A thorough literature review shows how it is well established in the literature that
performance appraisal (PA) in modern organisations is infused with many problems.
However, at the same time PA is one of the most institutionalised features of running
large corporations everywhere in the Western world. Problems in PA challenges
managers and employees and provoke important local adaption and meaning
creation processes across workforces in order to allow a meaningful fit between the
practice of PA and the task at hand in each workforce.
Through 34 qualitative interviews with manager-employee dyads, the study design
included a comparative study of local adaption and meaning creation in PA across
four different workforces over a full one-year PA-cycle in a case organisation where a
one-size-fits-all PA scheme had been implemented. Important differences in
environmental dynamics and in manager and employee enactment patterns were
found. Understanding these patterns is not only important for our understanding of
how PA schemes affect individuals' and organisations' performance. It is also more
fundamentally important to our understanding of the dynamics of the problems in PA
which have been uncovered, analysed and attempted to be solved over the last 20
years' scholarly research into PA, without any real breakthrough.
Austin's (1996) separation between management by delegation versus management
by measurement was used as a typology of differences in the task at hand in Sales,
R&D, Production and Staffs in the case organisation. Although PA as such is clearly
designed to operate within the management by measurement paradigm, comparative
findings across workforces show that important differences are present. Particularly,
Sales and R&D form contrasting cases in terms of characteristics of the task at hand
and characteristics of PA adaption and meaning creation. Thus, the study shows how
a standard corporate PA scheme can be twisted in different directions in different
workforces to such an extent that in R&D it can even be argued that the scheme in
some ways has more similarities with management by delegation than with
management by measurement. The study discusses the implications of this and
guidance to future research is provided. |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
