هنگامی که تعداد غیر قابل شمارش است : جایگزینی برای نظارت بر عملکرد کارکنان

This article presents an alternative viewpoint to the accepted wisdom that detailed performance measurement of individual employees is necessary to achieve superior performance. As we reveal, managers of a market-leading German energy distribution company do not utilize performance measures to manage the performance of their employees; rather, operational excellence is achieved through mechanisms ultimately based on trust and responsibility. Building on observations at this firm, we put forward a set of proposed characteristics of companies that may not require formalised individual performance measurement systems in order to achieve high performance standards.

The case study presented centers on the network division of one of the largest of over 800 German energy providers. The Company's core business is the supply of electricity and natural gas to over 1 million residential and industrial customers in northern Germany. The Company has a hierarchical structure with a head office and 12 regional branches, each with their own offices and maintenance centres (workshops). As of 2008, The Company had 5,350 employees in total and a financial turnover of €5.3 billion. The Company is jointly owned by a federation of cities and counties within its traditional distribution area. Despite operating in a sparsely populated region in northern Germany, The Company has demonstrated its efficiency and consistency by providing its customers with greater reliability of supply and lower costs than any other provider in the country.

Generalisations made from a single case study have limited validity. Contingency theory shows that there is no single best approach to managing people and organisations. Instead, the ‘best way’ is always dependent on the type of operating environment. If the outcomes evidenced in this study are to be considered valid in other situations, various aspects of the environment of the activities (contingency factors) have to be recognized and carefully considered. Examples of such contingency factors are: the complexity of the activities studied, culture, current performance of the company, and the rationale for the adoption of performance measurement practices. The activities explored in our study are embedded in market scenarios that are typical of utility companies. The insights generated from the outage restoration and preventive maintenance in the power distribution sector may be expected to be widely transferable—not only to other segments of the energy value chain, but also directly to other utilities such as water and sewage, waste disposal, rail, post, and fixed telephones. Such insights may also be extendable to further markets (again, with certain restrictions). The set of characteristics and practices proposed in this article contribute to the theorising of performance management. In the words of Weick (1995), the postulated framework is not a ‘grand theory’ but a necessary step in the theory development process, one that refines and develops the academic understanding of the roles and functioning of performance measurement systems. It appears to be essential to identify the circumstances under which organisational performance measurement allows a previously established basis of trust between an organisation and its managers to continue. This study has suggested that many of the roles played by individual performance measurement can be substituted by, or supported by, other mechanisms. A question for future research is, therefore, how performance information could be used in addition to these other mechanisms to build up employees’ intrinsic motivation rather than impair it.