Importance Of Employee Performance Management

Introduction

Employee performance measurement is a widely used tool in management practice, which has been the subject of many published studies in the organisational behaviour literature (Houldsworth, Jirasinghe, & Hay Group, 2006). Performance has been defined as an objective phenomenon, consisting of a set of attributes of a program, and its measureable impacts on society (Thomas, 2006), but what truly defines performance remains a disputed and ever changing notion. However, what is clear is that performance is a social construct i.e. without society it would not exist.

Performance measurement is the process that an organisation uses to monitor important aspects of its programs and systems, including the operational processes required to collect the data needed for the measures or indicators (Thomas, 2006). In order to evaluate performance, measures are developed to assess the extent to which the performance goals and objectives are being achieved. Meaningful performance measurement requires a baseline to which the measure can be compared (Henri, 2006). Importantly, performance captured by a particular set of measures will always be partial and contextual, and therefore, essentially subjective in nature (Behn, 2003).

Employees must know what they need to do to perform their jobs successfully. Employee performance management is a process that involves planning work and setting expectations, continually monitoring performance, developing the capacity to perform, periodically measuring performance standards, and rewarding good performance (Houldsworth, Jirasinghe, & Hay Group, 2006). Ideally, employee performance standards should be measurable, understandable, verifiable, equitable, and achievable. Employee engagement is key to im...

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...le to supervise, with the time best used for something else. In addition, it is a costly process, and these costs could be better directed towards other methods to increase business performance. The process itself is convoluted, bureaucratic, and over-complicated, being difficult to understand and manage for both the employee and the supervisor undertaking the assessment. The mechanistic basis of the assessment discourages entrepreneurial intuition and it is deemed monotonous as the same process occurs every year and nothing changes. Importantly, employee performance measurement is a subjective process.

Managerial implications of performance measurement

Implications for management processes and practices

Broader social and societal implications

Although performance measures shape behavior, they may shape behavior in both desirable and undesirable ways.

Conclusion