Performance Management System Implementation Challenges in State-Owned Enterprises

Literature Review

In recent years, especially the 21^st century, researchers believe that performance success is not achieved by adding employee's output together, but the results created by the business units for the organization to succeed. In Bacal & Associates (1993), it is opined that an organization succeeds as a result of the interaction of people, not the simple adding together of results. The whole is not simply a sum of its parts, but in a well-managed workplace, the parts interact to create a successful organization. There are assumptions that managers in organizations can evaluate performance thereby affecting classification, salary, and promotion of employees, at the same time act as a coach for performance management. Also, it is noted that without information from the employees, it will be difficult for managers to coach for improvement.

In a performance management system, employees are evaluated based on the achievement of their objectives (and standards). The payoff for employees is to get their things done, at times, competing for resources to the detriment of the achievement of other people’s objectives. In the government organization where I work, it is common for a person working on a project to reserve books and materials needed to complete their objectives, often without telling anyone they had done so. Things just disappeared, sometimes for months at a time. The collector benefited by making sure that his or her objective could be achieved, while others suffered because of this very short-sighted approach. It happens more often, and it results from the emphasis on individual achievement rather than corporate results say (Bacal, 1993). Performance management systems tend to send the message implicitly. Nobody intends it. Modern managers are realizing that teams are important to the achievement of organization objectives because many tasks are too large or complicated for one person to handle. So, they encourage people to work in teams. Usually, though, a manager committed to performance management will want to designate one person to be both responsible and accountable for the project, a team leader if you like.