Performance management, and in particular the performance appraisal process, is something that few organisations do particularly well.  A new paper published by the Journal of Personnel Psychology suggests that a big part of the blame for this sits at the feet of managers.

The paper unveils a 27 item measure of performance management behaviour, which the researchers believe can help organisations better understand whether managers have the skills to make the appraisal process valuable.

These include things such as goal setting, providing feedback and coaching, and the researchers believe that the framework both allows organisations to see whether managers are skilled in such tasks, and also how they’re performing in these areas in the review process.

Most importantly, the researchers say, if and when those managers are trained to improve their efforts on those 27 performance-management tasks, companies can and will see bottom-line success. Managers will be seen as more effective, and employees will be happier, too.

“I think most companies have a (broken) model for performance management and that’s why they have problems with them,” the researcher says. “What they haven’t done is identify the leadership behaviors that can actually make the process work. That’s what our article does — it points out that these companies haven’t trained these managers on how to exhibit these behaviors.”

Suffice to say, the challenge comes when the performance management process is not the sole preserve of managers themselves.  Are employees as a collective given the right kind of training into how to deliver feedback and the other 26 performance management tasks, so that they can then make the most effective use of the kind of social performance management tools provided by Work.com?

The research underlines the importance of the social and behavioural aspects of good performance management and provides a timely reminder of their importance to successful implementations.

Originally posted at Work.com