Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2012), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 61 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2012.07961haa.001

Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 61, Issue 8.

The papers in this issue reflect some of the key challenges that our society faces. They cover topics such as: organisations evolving into more knowledge-based units where professionals carry out their trade; the need to effectively organise large service-oriented organisations such as those in healthcare; the need to improve processes in our knowledge-based organisations (e.g. higher education and non-higher education), the need for individuals in globally dispersed organisations to collaborate more effectively with one another; and meeting the need for fairness in business and society by having performance management systems that motivate rather than alienate individuals. This seems to be a large enough agenda containing sufficient challenges to keep academics and practitioners in performance management busy for a while.

In our first paper, Groen, van de Belt and Wilderom set out to demonstrate why a performance measurement system (PMS) can be useful to a small professional service firm and show how to develop one. Their starting point, which rings true, is that in the past much of the published work on PMS relates to large firms and displays an in-built bias to focus on manufacturing. The authors argue for an increasing emphasis on service, knowledge-based firms which include professional service firms with highly educated employees in relatively flat organisational structures. Existing PMSs tend to have been designed according to a philosophy of hierarchical management which is not appropriate to this context. To demonstrate their approach the authors report on a case study with a law firm comprising 20 lawyers that carry out work on intellectual property law in Vietnam for customers that are typically large, blue chip firms. The authors used a methodology built around collaboration with the firm's employees and they claim to have helped increase individual's understanding, helped them to share existing knowledge and to create new knowledge. A claimed benefit of the approach, which links with the paper by Zhang et al., is that it helps align operations with strategy.

Organising healthcare productively is one of the key challenges that our society faces; certainly in the UK there is much evidence of restructuring of the National Health Service (NHS) to try to develop and discover ways of improving service delivery. In the second paper Zhang, Bamford, Moxham and Dehe use one particular incidence of this widespread restructuring imperative to explore how to link strategy to operations performance. Getting this link right has gained in importance to managers and researchers as one of the prominent performance management systems, the balanced scorecard (BSC), has matured and mutated in to the area of Closed-Loop Management Systems (CLMSs). CLMSs, as the term “closed-loop” suggests, are systems that ensure that strategy development leads to successful deployment by connecting strategy firmly with operations and vice versa. The authors provide a case study showing how a CLMS linked to a BSC was developed and implemented for a community health service that had to restructure to become more autonomous within the NHS.

In the next paper, Chattopadhyay and Ghosh venture into an area that is very much applied in practice, particularly in large firms, but does not attract a great deal of scrutiny from researchers. The authors focus on the principles and operational characteristics of the type of personnel appraisal system that is often relied on by large firms, namely a relative approach whereby employees’ annual performances are made to fit a banded distribution. For example, employees may be evaluated and their performance allocated in to six ordered performance bands with 15 per cent of employees in the top and another 15 per cent in the bottom performance bands. This means that no matter how accomplished a company's workforce, only 15 per cent can get the top ranking and therefore such appraisal systems can lead to employee dissatisfaction. The authors examine the mathematics of such forced distribution appraisal systems and suggest how they can be improved.

There is no doubt many increasingly see supply-chain collaboration as a good thing that will lead to improved performance of supply chains and constituent members. However, collaboration is a complex, multi-faceted construct that has been modelled by researchers in various different ways. Kumar and Banerjee focus on building and testing a comprehensive, hierarchical model of supply-chain collaboration. They obtain data from Indian manufacturing companies and use partial least squares to generate a statistically valid model. The constituents of their model include: collaborative culture, joint planning, joint problem solving and performance measurement and resource sharing. Nice to see that performance measurement is one of the key elements!

Next we have two reflective practice papers that are united in looking at the education sector – but looking at different parts. In the first, intriguing paper the authors, Pereira and Melão, describe and reflect on an attempt to introduce the BSC into a Portuguese school district. As they point out, not many studies so far have been published on implementing the BSC in this type of context, despite the pressure to apply the BSC to the public sector. This pressure is not without resistance – as many might argue applying business ideas to public sector can be challenged on fundamental, philosophical grounds while supporters might point to the need for the public sector to be cost efficient as “trumping” such niceties. Their paper is instructive in describing a non-successful (I avoid using the word failed since one could claim the scheme was not really put into action sufficiently to be classed as failed) attempt to implement BSC and exposes some of the barriers, obstacles and challenges encountered in the public sector. A significant obstacle they recognised was that those involved in the design and implementation of the scheme lacked sufficient knowledge of concepts such as strategic management. The authors identified employee motivation as a key challenge. In particular they highlighted that teachers were apprehensive of how an overarching performance management scheme would interact with their own performance evaluation – which is a critical consideration in this environment. Conversely the authors identify that the participative approach that was deployed in this initiative was particularly beneficial in engendering support from the educational community. However, one of the main issues that they identify as undermining the BSC initiative is the constant reorganising that the school district faced, something that is pretty much endemic in the battered, public sector.

In contrast to the previous paper's focus on non-higher education, the authors in this next paper turn to higher education. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is one of the latest performance improvement approaches; one that integrates two previous separate methodologies – lean thinking and Six Sigma. With roots firmly embedded in manufacturing, often in private sector organisations, applying such approaches and methodologies to service and public sector organisations can be, and often is, challenged. The authors of the final paper (Antony, Krishnan, Cullen and Kumar) examine the barriers to introducing LSS in to the UK's public sector of higher education and come to the conclusion that, despite few instances of LSS's application to this context, there are no valid reasons for not applying it to this context.

Given the contrasting contexts, methodologies, viewpoints and outcomes discussed in these last two papers, it might be interesting for the authors of these last two papers to get together and discuss some of the issues involved in applying performance management to the education sector!

Tom Burgess and John Heap