Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2010), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 59 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2010.07959haa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 59, Issue 8

This issue of the journal comprises six academic papers that cover two complementary areas: public sector and services. In the first paper Posayanant and Chareonngam provide a case study of applying the balanced score card to a tier of local government in Thailand. A particularly interesting aspect of their paper is that they take the four perspectives, originally designed for customer-oriented private-sector organisations, and recast them in to a suitable form for the public sector.

The authors of the second paper Amir, Ahmad and Mohamad report on their investigation of performance measurement system (PMS) attributes in service organisations in Malaysia. Their quantitative study uses a large sample survey of Malaysian service organisations to examine how a number of factors affect the design of the company’s PMS. The authors find that mass and professional service companies are alike in their preference for contemporary PMS types but overall the firms still cling to traditional, financial-oriented approaches. They indicate that factors such as business strategy and competitive market conditions are more likely to determine the type of PMS than factors such as the process type, i.e. whether the company is classed as mass or professional services.

Laureani, Antony and Douglas present a case study of lean six sigma in a call centre and demonstrate how this philosophy, despite its manufacturing connotations, is of equal value in a service environment. The case study is a very readable illustration of the both the overall lean six sigma approach to improvement projects and the application of individual techniques.

In their paper, Ben-Gal, Wangenheim and Shtub describe a model for working out physician staffing at Israeli hospitals that relies on work (activity) sampling and time study principles. I find this paper particularly intriguing since applying scientific management techniques to the task of planning doctors’ workloads is not something that I would expect to be readily acceptable in a UK context, given the status and power accorded to doctors in our health system.

In the next paper by Desai we encounter the use of a research paradigm that is the antithesis of the scientific management approach used to effect in the previous paper and, to a lesser extent, the other preceding papers. The research in this paper, although located in the same business context as the third paper, i.e. call centres, certainly stands as a counterpoint to that by Laureani, Antony and Douglas. In this paper the author uses a number of theories to analyse qualitative data from interviews. The author presents an interesting approach to understanding how individual employee performance is linked to management control systems.

The final paper, by Westover and Taylor, returns to a more quantitative approach. They analyse secondary data drawn from large sample surveys of workers in six developed economies by applying statistical methods including ordinary least squares regression. The focus of their investigation is on job satisfaction, does it differ across countries, what determines this key variable and has it changed over a 16-year period? One of the key issues they explore is the impact on job satisfaction of the fit between the individual’s public sector motivation and what their job provides. What they found was “respondents who perceived a closer fit between their public service motives and the ability of their jobs to realise these motives were more satisfied with their jobs than those who saw otherwise”.

Overall, what these six papers suggest to me is that there is a great deal of commonality between the services and public sector. They also indicate that there are still major opportunities to carry out research to improve our understanding of how performance is determined in these contexts. Finally, the papers also demonstrate that a variety of different research approaches are available to be deployed and these can be worthwhile in assisting our understanding of performance management. I do hope that you, the reader, will find something of interest within this issue.

Thomas Burgess, John Heap