Soon after an Australian organisation introduced a performance management system (PMS), the researchers asked employees to comment on their attitudes to the PMS. In addition, key stakeholders, managers and employees were interviewed to determine what they considered the impact of the PMS to have been.
The results indicated that those workgroups that were already performing well benefited from the PMS, whereas those that were not had a more negative attitude to the PMS and were less positive about its impact on performance. The stakeholders and managers stated that the PMS had a more positive impact on performance than did the employees. Other successful outcomes as a result of the introduction of the PMS included: increased role clarity, standardisation of performance objectives, increased feedback on performance and the development of more accurate and relevant performance measures.
The study also highlighted the difficulties encountered when evaluating PMS. Both the timing of the evaluation and the measures used need to be carefully considered when designing the evaluation.
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