Editorial

Citation

Radnor, Z. (2006), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 55 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2006.07955eaa.001

Editorial

Following the recent double issue on manufacturing and design, this issue moves the focus onto other areas, reflecting the fact that performance measurement and management impacts upon so many areas of activity. In the workplace many of us have performance targets regimes and imposed upon us. (For example, even in higher education in the UK, we have the Research Assessment Exercise and Teaching Quality Assessment processes.) Even in our home lives some of us manufacture our own simple performance management systems such as “star charts” to motivate our children. In our wider “commercial” life we are becoming used to companies asking us if we are “satisfied customers.” In all this, we often use many terms interchangeably (measure, target, objective) and perhaps we should stop to ask ourselves the question – when assessing the effects of performance measurement and management when are we considering the measure and when are we considering the target?

Stopping to ask such questions often throws up some interesting issues. It also throws up some questions, which are very interesting but unanswerable! Why do people who go to a gym for exercise always want to park right outside the door? Even answerable questions might prove difficult since often we come up with an answer we didn’t want. Or we get an answer that isn’t really an answer. “Why do we do it that way … Because we always have done.” This is the question and answer start to many improvement projects.

Name three world-class manufacturers. No, two more besides Toyota! Now, consider … are the organisations you have listed truly world-class manufacturers, or are they world-class designers, or promoters, or … Just because a company manufactures goods and is a world-class company, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the manufacturing processes are world-class.

The first paper in this issue by Yilmaz and Bititci compares performance measurement in the manufacturing and tourism industries. They find in this comparison, and this may be unsurprising, that performance measurement in manufacturing organisations is more likely to extend across the whole organisation and, can normally be considered to be more “mature” than the performance measurement regimes in the tourism industry. However, they argue that tourism is also an intra-organisational activity so should consider developing performance measures similar to those in manufacturing.

The second paper by Pransky et al., compares the measures, which are self-reported, and those, which are objective, related to office tasks. They find in their research that there are inconsistencies among workers in the correlation between the two types of measures. They also suggest that collecting and managing detailed measures can be complex and the interpretation of them difficult. Therefore, it can be argued that in such cases there are limits to the effectiveness of detailed measurement.

The final academic paper by Karvinen and Bennett describes an investigation into how company performance can be improved by integrating internal and external customers and technology. The research was based in a building components industry and showed how developing a customer orientation in the organisation contributed to productivity improvement. The study involved “action research” and the paper illustrates how this approach contributed to the organisational change.

The first practitioner paper in this issue (Denton) relates to the problem of aligning individual efforts towards common goals. It suggests that a “work system” can be designed and built around “the bigger picture” to bring about this alignment.

The second (Rao) is a “grounding” paper, moving the focus from this “bigger picture” to look at practical ways of motivating employees – in this case via the use of a multi-factor, group incentive scheme within a public sector manufacturing organization.

We know that the public and private sectors have as many similarities as differences. In some parts of the world, there is much more blurring between these sectors and public control is used to drive change. For example, it is clear that from a recent visit to China, the Central Government does not just intend to build a first-class economy in China – it also wants the Chinese to build a first-class economy outside of China through investment in, and partnership with, overseas companies. Not only are they building; now they are coming!

Zoe Radnor, John Heap