Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 62 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2013.07962gaa.001

Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 62, Issue 7.

This issue reflects two key themes: one, the measurement of the individual's performance within an organisation and two, decision techniques that can support the person conducting the performance evaluation. This focus on the individual is in tune with the oft-stated assertion that humans are the critical organisational resource. Perhaps the other notable factor relating to this issue is the degree of quantitative analysis and modelling involved in the papers. Is performance management moving more towards “science” than “art” – or does this simply reflect one of those coincidences that sometimes occur?

We have four standard papers and one reflective practice paper in this issue.

One of the features of our current economy is the attention that banking continues to attract. This first paper by Mangold focuses on the performance of individual client advisors in retail banks. Data are drawn from 521 advisors in Switzerland and processed using multiple regression. While the thoroughly conducted analysis identifies some useful factors that determine performance, an interesting aspect to the analysis is the light it sheds on the sales orientation of retail banking. It is a telling point that the performance of the advisor is measured by the sales revenue that they generate. One wonders if a better performance measurement and incentive system might be in order here – one that encourages bankers to focus on customer service?

With the on-going march of globalisation, securing good performance of workers who are posted overseas becomes more and more important. Bhatti, Battour and Ismail conduct a heavily quantitative study into the impact of various individual and organisational factors on the job performance of citizens from various countries working in Malaysia, a multi-cultural society. The study uses data taken from 201 expatriate workers from Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Performance data are obtained from the workers’ supervisors who rated the performance of the individuals. Structured equation modelling (AMOS 16) was the method of analysis in the study. The authors highlight in their findings the important variable of expatriate adjustment which has a major impact on job performance. Expatriate adjustment basically concerns whether the worker is comfortable with the new environment that they have to come to terms with. Three areas of adjustment are identified: to the work, to the general environment (of food, language, transport, etc.) and to the people. Unsurprisingly, adjustment in all three areas is important in predicting good supervisory-rated job performance.

Evaluating the performance of individual employees can be a difficult job for the manager. If, as we are so often told, human resources are the crucial resource within any organisation then this means that managers need to make decisions about performance that are accurate and defensible. However, the nature of performance evaluation of individuals is that it can be easily challenged on the basis of not being precise and objective. Ahmed, Sultana, Paul and Azeem from Bangladesh and Australia demonstrate how a decision support can be designed and implemented to help managers make decisions systematically in imprecise circumstances by using fuzzy logic. The performance evaluation system they build and apply takes in to account 20 criteria on which decisions are made. This is clearly the kind of system that would appeal to a large organisation that is looking to ensure consistency in decision making.

Ensslin, Ensslin, Back and Lacerda, a team drawn mainly from Brazil, also look to build a decision support model for human resource situations; in their case the model deals with allocating staff to projects based on the individual's level of expertise. These authors, as with the previous group, approach the situation in a systematic way but this time they use crisp data, i.e. they do not go down the route of using fuzzy numbers. Instead, they use a constructivist approach to multi-criteria decision making that takes into account 76 criteria that are applied to 800 employees within the firm's workforce.

In the final, reflective practice paper, Storch, Nara and Kipper from Brazil look at some of the practical issues related to adopting business process management in a systematic way. They focus on the use of performance measures and show how the actual use of performance measures does not match with what would be expected if, for example, they follow those required by a balanced scorecard. They indicate that companies need to do more work in identifying the performance measures that are needed if they are to be used in a coherent and comprehensive way to foster an effective value chain.

Tom Burgess and John Heap