Human oriented performance management: Is there a gap between executives and non-executives?

For organizations it is important to translate the strategy and goals of the organization in tangible targets for the employees. Often, this leads to many Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the employees. However, the link between their personal KPI’s and the goals of the organization is not always recognised. Therefore, based on previous research into performance management and on theories of organizational behaviour, culture and performance a model was developed to measure human oriented performance management in organizations. Human oriented performance management is all about establishing a direct connection between the objectives and strategy of an organization (or part thereof) and the activities and tasks of the people in the different processes. The research question in this paper is to what extent the dimensions of human oriented performance management do occur within organizations and how these dimensions are perceived by executive and non-executive employees. Using a mixed method approach, survey data was collected among 64 employees of three organizations, and additional eight interviews with executives and eight interviews with non-executives were held to explore and understand the results of the survey. The results show that continues improvement and organizational learning have the highest scores within all of the organizations. The lowest score for all the organizations is Visualization. Executives score slightly higher on most dimensions of human oriented performance management. Especially, the difference between the dimensions Action orientation and Dialogue is notable. The main conclusion is that it\u27s unclear to which extent management and employees really talk about the performance and how to improve it. For many non-executives it is unclear what the organization objectives are and how they perform on these objectives