PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Performance Management

Performance Management

Introduction

With organizations attaching greater emphasis to knowledge workers, it is necessary to understand how performance management practices facilitate achievement of managed performance (e.g. service delivery, service quality/products and cost reduction). According to (Lewicki, 1995, 96), performance management is a means of getting better results from the whole organization or teams or individuals within it, by understanding and managing performance within an agreed framework of planned goals, standards and competence requirements. Public universities in Uganda are facing challenges such as reduced funding from the government, restructuring, downsizing and reengineering. These universities also have to operate as for profit-organizations for sustainability, making them operate as both public and private institutions at the same time. This means commercialization of academic programs with mass education as opposed to elite education. Consequently, the shift to mass education has eroded the universities' main goal of increasing the institutional flexibility, building productive and adaptive capacity in terms of service delivery, particularly with regard to teaching and research. Despite the recruitment of some senior faculty into administrative roles, public universities of Uganda increasingly are run by managers who often have strongly tayloristic visions of work organization and operate at a great distance from the site of value production (Breakwell, 2000, 45).

Discussion

According to researchers, performance management is about directing and supporting employees to work as effectively and efficiently as possible in line with the needs of the organization. This requires paying attention to employee attitudes that improve the relationship between the employers and employees. These include job satisfaction, commitment and perceived psychological contract and so on. However, agency theory suggests that if both parties to the relationship are utility maximisers there is good reason to believe that the agent (employee) will not always act in the best interests of the principal (employer). An example showed that the forces of self-interest amplified by commercialization of academic programs eroded the institutional integrity of Makerere University. This situation of inequitable pay of allowances among employees has not only become problematic at Makerere University but has become wide spread in all public universities (Bunker, 1996, 90).

Researchers argued that when administrators are trapped in such a situation that might precipitate into job insecurity and resistance to their decision making by board of directors, often they increase their commitment to a losing course of action. This is not because they want to rationalize or justify a decision to themselves, but because their credibility is being threatened by other organizational factors such as top management homogeneity, top management succession, top management tenure and past performance. To support this theory, researchers found out that past failure resulted in increased future investments compared to past successes (Lyons, 2000, 175).

Researchers argued that over-emphasis on control may be counter-productive. For instance, researchers found out that in extreme counter-productive climate, employees develop coping strategies by doing what is minimal or default whenever they have an opportunity while others either quit the job or stay but sacrifice quality for ...