Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T.F. and Heap, J. (2015), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 64 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-02-2015-0030

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 64, Issue 4

Performance measurement and management of professional and knowledge work

The knowledge economy, although a diffuse concept, is held to be of increasing importance and with it the notion of knowledge work has gained increasing traction. Peter Drucker is said to have coined the phrase “knowledge worker” in 1959 (see Drucker, 1959) and to have considered knowledge worker productivity to be the next frontier of management (Drucker, 1999). The idea of knowledge work overlaps with that of professions; for example a key defining element of a profession is the use of an established body of knowledge (The UK Inter-Professional Group (UKIPG), 2002). In contrast to the (relatively) recent recognition of knowledge work, professions such as those related to the church, law, medicine and education have been around for centuries. Might we consider the new knowledge workers as the vanguard of a new, professional elite?

Autonomy and self-management have long been held to be key privileges enjoyed by the professional. However, societal pressures have eroded the professional’s privileged position and their productivity has increasingly come under scrutiny as part of Drucker’s new managerial frontier. But how have the struggles between professional and manager unfolded so far – and what will happen in future? How is the performance of professionals and knowledge workers measured and managed? How much do we know about professionals and how they manage their work; and are today’s pressures changing things? Traditional areas of the professions, such as law, are being pushed in to the marketplace and are they reacting by managing the professionals in different ways? Clearly, these are substantial questions and we cannot hope to provide comprehensive and definite answers in this Special Issue – but we can hope to illuminate some of the key aspects and stimulate a greater interest in this area through the six standard papers and a reflective practice paper in this issue.

Knowledge, for some, forms part of a hierarchy that includes data and information as “stepping stones” to knowledge. Data and information have proliferated with the onward march of information technology; and this technology has fuelled such concepts as knowledge management. Information technology is often credited as enabling improved performance and improved productivity of work. However, a key issue that has attracted comment and research is the idea of the “productivity paradox”. The famous comment from Solow (1987) “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics” sums up this paradox in that the link between IT investment and increased productivity is ambiguous. A reason often put forward for this ambiguity is the problem with performance measurement. In their paper Hajili, Sims and Ibragimov provide an up-to-date economic analysis of the figures and indicate that, surprisingly (!), the link between IT investment and productivity continues to remain ambiguous.

The phrase “work smarter, not harder” is often used as a management maxim – but how do you do this? Palvalin, Vuolle, Jääskeläinen, Laihonen and Lönnqvist set about to develop an audit tool to analyse current knowledge-work practices and help to identify those aspects of development initiatives that are “smarter”. As the authors observe, performance of knowledge work is a difficult phenomenon to approach. Based on the literature and interviews with practitioners they designed a questionnaire for individual knowledge workers to complete. This questionnaire was tried out in four organisations and results compared. The framework embodied in the questionnaire splits the drivers of performance in to two groups: contextual factors and individual ways of working. These then affect the two areas of results: well-being at work and productivity. The authors recognise this is a preliminary piece of work that is biased towards addressing the needs of practitioners, but as such it forms a useful platform for further work.

One of the features of the modern work environment is the increased expectation that the worker will “go the extra mile” and display performance, i.e. extra-role performance (ERP), that goes beyond the base level performance expected as a consequence of their normal role, i.e. task performance. In particular there is a heightened expectation that such extra performance is the hallmark of a professional. As the authors of the next paper point out, teachers constitute one of the largest groups of knowledge workers and therefore the determinants of their ERP is of interest. Duyar, Ras and Pearson study the impact of different levels of school autonomy on teacher’s task performance and ERP – in particular they compare public and charter (private) schools. Confusingly in the UK, “public” schools are privately owned but the authors’ study is based in the USA where the normal interpretation applies. The proponents of private schools often argue that their freedom from a monolithic state system provides autonomy and flexibility in which teachers and pupils can “shine”. The authors carry out a large scale survey of teachers (80 schools and over 900 respondents) and use multivariate techniques to analyse the data. They find that teachers in privately owned schools display significantly higher task and extra-role performances. However, the authors caution against a simple interpretation of the results as being down to differences in the autonomy of the two environments since they also found differences in the demographics of the two workforces. The charter schools have, in general, a teaching workforce that is younger and less experienced.

Talent management is a burgeoning area of research and practice, witness that we have two papers in this issue (described in this paragraph and the next) that cover this aspect. The basic idea underlying this approach is to identify the talent in the human resource and to focus on developing these assets so that the organisation benefits from improved performance. In this first paper on the subject in this issue Lopes, Sarraguça, Lopes and Duarte focus on a traditional area of knowledge work, that of law. They propose a new approach of analysing appraisal and assessment centre data to underpin the activity of talent management. A sample of 61 Portuguese lawyers provided the data that the authors analysed on three broad factors: hard skills, soft skills and productivity. They assert that their approach enables more objective assessment of an individual’s talents and clearer identification of high flyers that hitherto.

According to the author of this next paper, the increasing popularity of talent management has exposed the limited understanding of how the management of individual’s talents feeds through in to employee performance. Mensah sets out to plug this gap by developing a conceptual framework that integrates the existing knowledge that they review on these two subject areas. He sees that both researchers and managers can benefit from this conceptual framework; the former can use the framework as the basis for theorising and empirical work while the latter can use it to inform the organisation’s strategy and practices.

Kumari, Sahney, Madhukar, Chattoraj and Sinni focus on the productivity of scientists and technical staff for a publicly funded R&D organisation in India. As is typical of many knowledge-based organisations, work is structured around projects – in this case research projects. The authors carried out a regression analysis of data collected from 117 respondents and examined project-related factors which influence the annual output of the R&D workers in terms of such as published artefacts. The higher the utilisation of the knowledge workers then the higher the output but, in general, a worker was operating below 80 per cent of capacity. Being involved in a higher number of projects, and therefore higher project variety, increased an individual’s output levels while having to carry out administrative roles reduced output. The organisation runs what are termed “network” projects which involve collaboration across industry, academia and research organisations. Involvement in such network projects, as against single-partner projects, also contributed to higher output. However, involvement in projects that aligned with the organisation’s core mission also enhanced output and productivity.

In the final paper, a reflective practice piece, Wake concentrates on the use of the balanced scorecard (BSC) to measure knowledge work. He argues that in the control of knowledge work the BSC does not function as Kaplan and Norton (1996) envisage – but he does go on to describe the role that the BSC can fulfil in the effective control of knowledge workers. This is an interesting critique of Kaplan and Norton who advocated that the BSC was an appropriate tool for the new, information age which was underpinned by knowledge work. The author develops his argument by using interviews in a case study of a UK division, of a multi-national, that designs and manufactures capital equipment to customer order. Interestingly a key part of the organisation’s overall control system is project management which works in tandem with the BSC. Wake refers to a three-level view of the organisation, i.e. strategic, managerial and operational. He comments that the BSC is the major mechanism for setting “what” needs to happen strategically while the “how” is provided by operational control systems such as project management. This stands in contrast to Kaplan and Norton envisage BSC providing integrated planning and control at all levels. Basically, part of the author’s argument is that Kaplan and Norton’s approach is too monolithic for the complex, knowledge-based enterprise that was studied.

Thomas F. Burgess and John Heap

References

Drucker, P.F. (1959), Landmarks of Tomorrow, Heinemann, London

Drucker, P.F. (1999), “Knowledge worker productivity: the biggest challenge”, California Management Review, Vol. 41 No. 2, pp. 79-94

Kaplan, R. and Norton, D. (1996), The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA

Solow, R.M. (1987), “We’d better watch out (review of: manufacturing matters: the myth of the post-industrial economy)”, New York Times Book Review, Vol. 12, July, p. 36

The UK Inter-Professional Group (UKIPG) (2002), “Professional regulation”, a position statement by the UK Inter-Professional Group, London