Building Performance Management through Employee Participation - Essay Example

To ensure the employees are motivated and committed to achieving organizational goals and consequently success or effectiveness, performance management is crucial. Most people use the terms performance management and performance appraisal interchangeably but performance appraisal is just part of performance management aimed at ensuring that employees perform their jobs up to the expected standards. Since performance management involves ensuring the right employee behavior, employees’ participation in the process is key to effectiveness.

Failure to involve employees in making decisions in issues that affect them may lead to negative results as illustrated in the Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company (JMI). These include poor job attitudes, reduced motivation, and reduced effort on the job (Mathis and Jackson 354). Employee participation is considered crucial in “determining whether specific performance management methods, procedures and requirements will be accepted and that they work effectively to support performance improvement” (OPM.gov). Employee dissatisfaction is as a result of not engaging employees in the process.

Employees have different personalities and thus different opinions and perceptions. As such, seeking their opinion in issues that affect them ensures acceptability and commitment (Roberts 89). Consider JMI which a performance management in place but employees were dissatisfied with the way goal-directed behavior was being encouraged. If the organization had involved the employees in deciding on the goals to be accomplished and the expected performance standards, the employees would have been comfortable with the process since they are already aware of what is expected of them.

Besides, Roberts asserts that if the employees are involved in setting standards and performance measures, they cannot perceive the process to be unfair (93). As such employee participation in the process leads to increased reliability, fairness and validity. He also asserts that since employees’ gain ownership of the process, they are committed to ensuring its success (89). Employee participation in designing the rating form makes it acceptable to the ratees hence minimizing conflicts between management and employees.

After engaging employees in the performance management process, JMI was able to get commitment and support from employees and improved performance. This was through improvements to the system, that is, their views were incorporated during the redesigning process thus creating a system acceptable to all and which linked performance management to other human resource activities. This case is thus a good example of how employee participation enhances greater support for the system. The experience of JMI is also a lesson to other organizations on how performance management systems can be improved.

One of the ways to improve the system is through continuous feedback. Some organizations hold review meetings annually thus do not give employees frequent feedback. This is detrimental to the organization since an employee is unable to understand whether he or she is accomplishing what he/she set out to accomplish or make amendments and move in the right direction. As a result, the performance may not improve. For Roberts, job satisfaction and performance can be enhanced by use of a “specific, timely and behavioral feedback by a credible source” (93).

Frequent feedback also allows redefining of goals and