Performance Management: State‐of‐the‐art and Implications for Europe and beyond

• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12357
• Author: Vinh Sum Chau

Performance Management: State-of-the-art

and Implications for Europe and beyond

VINH SUM CHAU

University of Kent, UK

Introduction

Financial crises, European migrant crisis, food security,

environmental concerns, the aged and healthcare

sustainability and related scandals, and of course not

forgetting, the very imminent likelihood of Brexit –to

name just a few, are only some of the many global

difficulties faced by policy makers of European nations

today. Solutionsfor these are often expected to come from

the broad field of ‘performance management’,andyetasa

field, if not even a subject, it is both eclectic and all-

embracing. From time to time, and increasingly so, there

are news reports of major corporations and institutions

abandoning their performance management systems in

favour of other methods that better resolve problems, but

they encompass similar features (Cappelli and Tavis,

2016) –those of individual and at institutional levels.

Performance management deals also with activities at

the detailed firm inter-relationship level (Bui et al.,

2019b), the broader company managerial level (e.g., Bui

et al., 2019a), as well as the more obvious macro-

economic level in ways that cover a broad spectrum of

organizational functions. For instance: in management

accounting, on how a firm improves profitability and is

evaluated (e.g., Kaplan and Norton, 1996); in marketing,

on the reception of a product or services sold or delivered

(e.g., Ambler et al., 2004); in human resources

management, onthe way appraisals of staff are conducted

to enhance work relations and overall firm productivity

(e.g., Fletcher, 2010; DeNisi and Murphy, 2017); and in

strategic management, on ensuring policy decisions

concerning daily activities are well aligned with the

long-term strategic direction of the firm (e.g., Witcher

and Chau, 2012), among many others. These then can

be borrowed and adapted to serve for the more media

headline driven problems.

Solutions for any headline problem need also come

from global efforts,and these start from national and firm

level activities, concerning which theories and

management frameworks about improving performance

have been developed and revised earnestly. This is a core

purpose within EMR’s interested scope of publ ication. In

this editorial, the state-of-the-art on performance

management thinking is presented by introducing ten

articles that explore new aspects that are core but sparse

within the subject,which deal with ‘performance’not just

as an outcome but also in other interlinking ways that

ultimatelylead to it. Implications and suggesteddirections

for future research to help the many challenges in Europe

for the near and distant futures are finally presented.

Contributions in this issue

From the papers selectedfor this issue, ‘performance’vis-

à-vis performance management per se, is treated in four

distinct groupings of: performance improvement as a

desired outcome; performance adjustments as an

intermediate variable that influences or moderates other

measured outcom es; people management and t heir

importance within the performance management system;

and performance management as a wholesystem wherein

attributes and features are questioned for their overall

effectiveness. These are introduced as follows.

Improving output as the ultimate goal is the popular

way research in performance management is conducted.

In the first article by Kostopoulos, performance is

considered as a measured outcome to research the effect

of empowerment of front-line employees on their

individual performance levels. Using data collected from

two major UK cities, he finds that empowerment does

have a non-linear (quadratic) impact, but this relationship

is positive for high levels of empowerment butis negative

for low levels. This relationship is further moderated by

the complexity of the service, where for low-complexity

services the relationship between empowerment and

performancewas found quadratic but for high-complexity

services the relationship was linear and positive. The

second paper, by Lauring and Villeseche, examines

performance also as an output but as a team which is

gender diverse in itscomposition. They examine how that

output variable ofperformance is determined by diversity

attributes (e.g., openness to diversity) and the diversity

(numerical) composition, and find that openness to

diversityis indeed associated with teamperformance. This

relationship is moderated by degree of gender diversity,

European Management Review, Vol. 16, 225–228, (2019)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12357

©2019 European Academy of Management