PSY 838 GCU Wk 1 Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales Essay As discussed in the literature, there are a number of FORMS used to capture performance informat | Course Hero
PSY 838 GCU Wk 1 Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales Essay As discussed in the literature, there are a number of FORMS used to capture performance information. As you mention, the BARS contains the most detailed anchors. However, these FORMs require substantial effort. Can you describe some of the limitations of BARS? Will a FORM solve the problem of poor performance management practices? In other words, even with the best form, will managers assign accurate ratings? 755303
research-article2018
JOMXXX10.1177/0149206318755303Journal of ManagementSchleicher et al. / Performance Management Systems Review
Journal of Management
Vol. 44 No. 6, July 2018 22092245
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318755303
10.1177/0149206318755303
© The Author(s) 2018
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Putting the System Into Performance
Management Systems: A Review and Agenda
for Performance Management Research
Deidra J. Schleicher
Texas A&M University
Heidi M. Baumann
Bradley University
David W. Sullivan
Texas A&M University
Paul E. Levy
University of Akron
Darel C. Hargrove
Central Michigan University
Brenda A. Barros-Rivera
Texas A&M University
It has been 13 years since the last comprehensive review of the performance management (PM)
literature, and a lot has changed in both research and practice in that time. The current review
updates (identifying new research directions post 2004) and extends this previous work by creating a systems-based taxonomy and conceptual model of PM. We then use this model to interpret
and integrate the extensive work in this area and to identify fruitful and systems-based directions for future PM work. As input to our conclusions, we reviewed the last 36-plus years of PM
research (19802017) and conducted a comprehensive coding of all empirical PM articles. We
offer several specific directions for future PM research, with the ultimate goal of improving PM
in practice.
Acknowledgment: This article was accepted under the editorship of Patrick M. Wright.
Supplemental material for this article is available with the manuscript on the JOM website.
Corresponding author: Deidra J. Schleicher, Department of Management, Mays Business School, Texas A&M
University, 4113 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4113, USA.
E-mail: dschleicher@mays.tamu.edu
2209
2210?? Journal of Management / July 2018
Keywords:
performance management; performance appraisal; performance evaluation; systems theory
Performance appraisal (PA) and performance management (PM) have historically been
areas of substantial focus in both research and practice.1 The vast majority of organizations
have formal PM systems (91% according to Cascio, 2006), and there is an incredibly voluminous research literature, including a number of previous reviews (e.g., Ilgen, BarnesFarrell, & McKellin, 1993; Landy & Farr, 1980; Levy & Williams, 2004). Yet despite the
omnipresence of PM in both practice and the research literature, there remain many unanswered questions about its effectiveness. In addition, it has been 13 years since the last comprehensive review of PA/PM (Levy & Williams, 2004), and in that time a number of new
directions have emerged. Some of these developments have been the subject of vociferous
debate in the literature and amongst practitioners, such as doing away with ratings or other
formal aspects of PM (e.g., Adler et al., 2016). As Levy, Tseng, Rosen, and Lueke recently
noted, If you think that we dont have a problem with current PM approaches and strategies,
you can do a simple Google search and tap into the uproar (2017: 156). We believe an
updated scholarly review is in order that can help shed light on these and other issues based
on empirical evidence. Accordingly, we conducted an extensive and critical review of more
than 36 years of the PM literature, with multiple goals and intended contributions.
First, given the time elapsed since the last comprehensive review (Levy & Williams,
2004), as well as the amount of PM research conducted in those intervening years and the
extent of discourse on this topic, there is need for an update. This is particularly true given
the unprecedented changes to PM systems in practice, with varying amounts of substantiation from the research literature (Levy et al., 2017). The PM landscape is very different than
it was even 10 years ago. We aim to review new PM practices and areas of inquiry that have
emerged in the scholarly literature and discuss how these compare to older research. We
provide summary information regarding what questions PM research is currently studying,
how it is studying these questions, and what we know (and do not know) as a result. This
information is provided in both qualitative and numerical form; the latter is possible because
we coded all empirical PM articles from 1980 to 2017 as input to this review, making this the
most comprehensive review of empirical PM research to date.
Second, our review is distinguished from prior reviews by focusing on PM, as opposed to
PA. As defined by Aguinis, PM is a continuous process of identifying, measuring, and
developing the performance of individuals and teams and aligning performance with the
strategic goals of the organization (2013: 2). The term PM is understood to have arisen
when practitioners (and eventually scholars) began talking about transforming PA from an
event to a process (see Bretz, Milkovich, & Read, 1992; Kinicki, Jacobson, Peterson, &
Prussia, 2013; M. J. Williams, 1997). Whereas PA is generally understood to be a discrete,
formal, organizationally sanctioned event, usually not occurring more frequently than once
or twice a year (DeNisi & Pritchard, 2006: 254), PM is seen as a broader set of ongoing
activities aimed at managing employee performance (M. J. Williams, 1997). In other words,
PA can be thought of as a subset of PM (see also Levy et al., 2017). Levy and Williams (2004)
referred to the scope of their review as PA; the current review is explicitly positioned more
Schleicher et al. / Performance Management Systems Review?? 2211
broadly as PM. Consequently, we cover some PM components not included in prior reviews,
such as setting performance expectations and employee coaching. We also emphasize the
role of context (as an input to PM), affording the first real opportunity to evaluate progress in
this area since Levy and Williams identified it as an emerging theme in research.
Third, our review introduces, and is organized around, a systems-based model of PM,
which provides a much-needed taxonomy for this area. Our review of 36-plus years of
research reveals no articulated consensus on what the main components of PM are or the
primary variables composing them. The lack of such a taxonomy to direct work in this area
has been explicitly mentioned as a difficulty in multiple research-practice panel discussions
on PM (Cavanaugh, Levy, Schleicher, Anseel, Colquitt, & Hunt, 2013; Schleicher, Levy,
Baumann, & Hartwell, 2012). To illustrate, some scholars place any activity related to managing employees under the PM label. For example, Roberts (2001) notes that
PM involves the setting of corporate, departmental, team, and individual objectives; the use of
PA systems; appropriate reward strategies and schemes; training and development strategies and
plans; feedback, communication, and coaching; individual career planning; mechanisms for
monitoring the effectiveness of PM system and interventions and even culture management. (as
quoted in den Hartog, Boselie, & Paauwe, 2004: 558)
In addition, DeNisi and Smith (2014) propose that PM should encompass all human resource
(HR) practices designed to give employees the means, motivation, and opportunity to
improve firm-level performance. Such broad definitions are at odds with other accepted definitions in the literature (e.g., Aguinis, 2013) and, importantly, do not place meaningful
boundaries around what PM is and is not, as they essentially exclude no HR practices as
being outside of PM. Moreover, as displayed in our model, there is a lot more to PM than just
practices; the context and individuals involved matter greatly in PM, and there is a need for
a parsimonious way to categorize all of these other relevant variables. As we develop later,
we believe the lack of such a taxonomy in the extant literature has hindered progress towards
cumulative scientific knowledge. Accordingly, we provide a systems-based taxonomy of PM
grounded in both the extensive empirical literature and theory and that can usefully guide
both future research and practice in this area. This taxonomy is also useful for the current
review, providing an effective framework for organizing the truly voluminous PM literature,
including what we are currently studying, how this differs from what we studied in the past,
and what we do and do not know about PM as a result.
Fourth, we make an important conceptual contribution by applying a systems theoretical
framework to both assimilate current knowledge and chart a course for future research in
PM. A system, simply put, is a set of interrelated elements, such that a change in one element
affects other elements in the system, and an open system is one that also interacts with its
environment (Katz & Kahn, 1978). The interrelated components of a system are designed to
work together and function as a whole to achieve a common purpose (Boulding, 1956).
Despite the fact that PM processes in organizations are often referred to as PM systems, historically PM has not been researched in this way. We feel that a systems approach is essential
both for distilling knowledge about the effectiveness of PM from the extant literature (as
such questions ultimately rely on an examination of multiple components and how they interrelate) and for identifying additional questions that we should be studying and ways in which
we ought to be studying them. Both of these are made possible by an articulation and
2212?? Journal of Management / July 2018
application of systems theory principles (which we discuss below), and both lead to the ultimate goal of better understanding PM systems in organizations.
To illustrate the unique value of our approach, we provide three examples of recent
debates within PM and discuss how our review and the systems-based model on which it
is based affect the understanding of these questions and suggest the direction of future
research that might help resolve them. These include assertions that (a) the informal aspects
of PM are more important than the formal aspects (e.g., Pulakos & OLeary, 2011), (b) performance ratings are inaccurate and not particularly useful and therefore should be done
away with (e.g., Adler et al., 2016), and (c) PM processes should be streamlined to remove
their low value aspects (Effron & Ort, 2010). After we describe our literature search, introduce our systems-based model, and summarize the research about each of the components of
PM in turn, we integrate this research vis-à-vis systems theory and discuss the implications
for understanding these and other timely issues in PM.
Literature Search and Coding of Empirical Articles
We comprehensively reviewed the last 36-plus years (1980June 2017) of PM work,
using a two-step literature search to find relevant articles.2 First, we searched Business
Source Complete, using the terms performance management, performance appraisal, and
performance evaluation. Second, given our primary focus on recent research and to ensure
we did not miss any relevant articles, we also manually searched a number of journals from
2004 to 2017 that either are considered top management outlets or are specialty outlets that
publish a significant amount of PM-related work (according to our database of articles):
Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied
Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, Personnel Psychology, The International Journal of Human Resource
Management, and Public Personnel Management. This resulted in 1,915 articles.
An important aspect of our review involved systematically coding and classifying all
empirical PM articles into the components of our model and along multiple other dimensions
(see Table 1). We carefully reviewed the above articles and parsed them into a subset that
empirically studied PM (including case studies and qualitative research in addition to quantitative research). This process resulted in a set of 575 empirical articles (614 separate studies). Each of these studies was then coded by the authors (we also captured information on
all variables studied in an article as well as the articles results). Coders were trained via
multiple calibration sessions, and a subset of 20 articles coded by all five coders showed
good agreement on coding. Following the coding process, an additional 62 studies were
excluded for having very weak methodology,3 resulting in a final sample of 552 empirical
studies. Summary information on these articles is reported in Table 1.
Our Systems-Based Model of PM
We created our systems-based model of PM (see Figure 1) with two purposes in mind: to
offer a taxonomy for organizing the myriad variations (i.e., all the moving parts) of PM in
both research and practice and to provide a conceptual framework for integrating all of this
research to better understand the effectiveness of PM and identify future research needs. We
relied specifically on the congruence systems model by Nadler and Tushman (1980, 1984)
2213
Total studies
Study setting
Lab
Field
In situ
Study focal participant
Employees
Students
Managers
Organization level
Data source
Archival
Experiment
One-time survey
Qualitative
Quasi-experiment
Time-lagged or
longitudinal
PM purpose
Not stated
Stated explicitly
Inferred
Varied
393,298
43,792
326,459
23,047
258,463
19,644
61,687
32,127
69,202
20,731
218,745
7,016
6,460
53,257
117,434
153,890
56,350
65,624
161
323
68
288
135
200
47
45
176
288
50
46
72
193
157
180
87
n
552
k
31.28
25.45
29.17
14.10
6.65
26.00
42.54
7.39
6.79
10.64
42.99
20.15
29.85
7.01
29.17
58.51
12.32
100
%
All Empirical Studies
28
27
51
10
4
40
54
7
19
14
50
31
34
10
32
61
11
104
k
%
24.14
23.28
43.97
8.62
2.90
28.99
39.13
5.07
13.77
10.14
40.00
24.80
27.20
8.00
30.77
58.65
10.58
18.84
Tasks
88
76
101
31
24
101
131
18
27
35
141
85
111
5
104
143
26
273
k
29.73
25.68
34.12
10.47
7.14
30.06
38.99
5.36
8.04
10.42
41.23
24.85
32.46
1.46
38.10
52.38
9.52
49.46
%
Individuals
61
70
90
44
21
79
122
21
28
28
115
54
88
32
62
144
29
235
k
23.02
26.42
33.96
16.60
7.02
26.42
40.80
7.02
9.36
9.36
39.79
18.69
30.45
11.07
26.38
61.28
12.34
42.57
%
Formal
Processes
Table 1
Descriptive Information on Coded Articles
72
43
55
34
10
52
104
12
11
28
103
39
54
8
47
106
23
176
k
35.29
21.08
26.96
16.67
4.61
23.96
47.93
5.53
5.07
12.90
50.49
19.12
26.47
3.92
26.70
60.23
13.07
31.88
%
Informal
Processes
44
23
26
44
12
17
80
12
2
8
53
11
30
31
16
86
8
110
k
%
32.12
16.79
18.98
32.12
9.16
12.98
61.07
9.16
1.53
6.11
42.40
8.80
24.00
24.80
14.55
78.18
7.27
19.93
Inputs
24.50
27.71
41.37
6.43
7.80
29.49
35.59
5.42
9.15
12.54
36.90
26.55
32.41
4.14
34.93
50.22
14.85
41.49
%
(continued)
61
69
103
16
23
87
105
16
27
37
107
77
94
12
80
115
34
229
k
Outputs
2214
118,343
45,313
45,408
36,110
7,197
71,134
258,583
74,547
10,914
15,210
331,843
84,456
15,240
89,685
134
80
167
11
17
75
413
47
46
17
831
168
50
292
145
n
12.53
3.73
21.77
26.27
61.97
2.84
12.54
69.06
7.86
7.69
32.76
19.56
40.83
2.69
4.16
%
8
0
12
24
96
4
7
87
10
6
27
18
49
2
2
k
%
6.90
0.00
10.34
23.08
82.76
3.51
6.14
76.32
8.77
5.26
27.55
18.37
50.00
2.04
2.04
Tasks
60
22
45
69
234
10
43
205
25
22
66
29
105
7
8
k
16.62
6.09
12.47
25.27
64.82
3.28
14.10
67.21
8.20
7.21
30.70
13.49
48.84
3.26
3.72
%
Individuals
k
35
3
20
62
201
5
26
186
23
14
13.51
1.16
7.72
26.38
77.61
1.97
10.24
73.23
9.06
5.51
30.73
21.95
39.02
2.93
5.37
%
Formal
Processes
63
45
80
6
11
Note: PM = performance management; PE = performance evaluation; PA = performance appraisal.
Stated PM purpose
Administrative
Developmental
Research
Selection
Other
Terminology used
PE
PA
PM
PA/PM
interchangeably
Distinguished
between PA and PM
Component studied as
Independent
variables
Moderators
Mediators
Dependent variables
Tested component
interactions
k
All Empirical Studies
Table 1 (continued)
40
15
22
46
146
4
27
131
20
12
41
23
52
1
3
k
17.94
6.73
9.87
26.14
65.47
2.06
13.92
67.53
10.31
6.19
34.17
19.17
43.33
0.83
2.50
%
Informal
Processes
18
6
11
32
100
4
12
81
15
10
21
12
30
1
5
k
%
13.33
4.44
8.15
35.96
74.07
3.28
9.84
66.39
12.30
8.20
30.43
17.39
43.48
1.45
7.25
Inputs
7
4
182
62
54
6
36
181
16
16
60
39
98
5
6
k
2.83
1.62
73.68
27.07
21.86
2.35
14.12
70.98
6.27
6.27
28.85
18.75
47.12
2.40
2.88
%
Outputs
Schleicher et al. / Performance Management Systems Review?? 2215
Figure 1
A Systems-Based Model of Performance Management
Internal
Interdependence
Formal
Processes
Informal
Processes
Tasks
Adaptaon
(The Workflow of Performance Management)
Equifinality
Setting
performance
expectations
Inputs
Observing
performance
Performance
coaching
Outputs
Integrating
performance
information
Performance
review meeting
Performance
feedback
Performance
evaluation
Individuals
Rater/Manager
Ratee/Employee
for developing our framework. Nadler and Tushman (1980) developed this model explicitly
to be less abstract and more pragmatic than general systems theories. In addition to specifying inputs and outputs to the system (as all systems models do), their model breaks down the
process component into four interdependent factors: tasks, individuals, formal processes, and
informal processes. Thus, our taxonomic model specifies that PM systems are made up of the
inputs and outputs of PM as well as four interdependent factors composing the process components of PM: tasks of PM, individuals involved in PM, formal processes of PM, and informal processes of PM (see Figure 1). These six components represent the most general level
of our PM systems taxonomy. Subcategories of this taxonomy were further distilled, using
systems theory (Katz & Kahn, 1978; Nadler & Tushman, 1980) and the review and coding
we did of the 552 empirical PM articles. The extended taxonomy resulting from this process
is displayed in Table 2 and discussed further in a later section. Each section below discusses
these six components in turn, summarizes directions since the last review and the conclusions
that can be drawn from recent research, and identifies areas for future study. These sections
consider each component in isolation, for purposes of clarity and comprehensiveness regarding our taxonomy (and because that is how the literature typically studies them).
Following the review of each PM component in isolation, we consider this research from
the perspective of systems principles. Systems theory includes a number of principles regarding how elements of the system are likely to interact. Some of these principles are graphically
depicted in Figure 1 (and there is a table in the online supplemental material that provides a
more detailed explanation of additional principles not captured here). Together, these principles emphasize a much more complex and dynamic view of PM than has typically been
addressed in extant research. As such, and as we discuss in this later section, they provide an
important and unique conceptual foundation that helps us make better sense of the extant
research and chart important directions for future research.
2216?? Journal of Management / July 2018
Table 2
Taxonomy of System Components and Subcategories
Component
Subcategory
Individuals
Ratee abilities,
skills, and
performance
Formal
Processes
Variables and Sample Research
? Performance mean, trend, and variation (Reb & Greguras, 2010)
? Proactive behavior (Grant, Parker, & Collins, 2009)
? Organizational citizenship behavior (Whiting, Podsakoff, & Pierce, 2008)
? Cognitive ability (Blume, Rubin, & Baldwin, 2013)
? Gender (Lyness & Heilman, 2006)
Ratee
? Race (Hernandez, Avery, Tonidandel, Hebl, Smith, & McKay, 2016)
demographic,
? Age (Kooij, Guest, Clinton, Knight, Jansen, & Dikkers, 2013)
cultural, a…
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