UTILITY EFFECT OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS WITHOUT PERFORMANCE REVIEWS: THE CASE OF A MULTINATIONAL ORGANISATION IN MALAWI

Abstract

There is a growing number of organizations that have concluded that formal performance reviews are unnecessary or even counter-productive. The aim of this research was to determine the utility effect of this global change in readjusting or fundamentally removing employee reviews has on the Performance Management process, tasks and subtask activities. Specifically, this study focuses on assessing how the removal of performance reviews affect the design and usefulness of the performance management process. From an empirical perspective, the study used International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) as a case study; IBM is a well-established organisation on performance management that announced a fundamental change in its Performance management process. Using Qualitative research methods, the findings indicate that the changes in performance review process had a noticeable effect on the effectiveness of the Performance Management process in IBM. The new process design presented in the paper allows employees, line managers and the business to extract the intended benefits of the Performance Management process tasks more effectively, however not fully eradicating the challenges with bias and line manager relationship as identified by other scholars.