The Characteristics of Performance Management Research — Implications and Challenges

There is now a growing interdisciplinary interest in organizational performance in all its manifestations (Neely and Waggoner, 1998). To date this interest has been sustained by the considerable attention the subject has been given by practitioners but more recently there has been a developing focus on the academic contributions that might be made to the field. […] [I]ncreasingly the notion of performance is being used as an integrating theme on postgraduate programmes to reflect ‘real world relevance’ and as way of integrating and balancing practically useful techniques (as used by managers and consultants), with theoretical constructs. This has moved the focus of study away from simply practice and more towards theory. We see this shift in emphasis as inevitable as academics will need to take a critical stance so that they can better understand and explore the theoretical and empirical bases on which many of the principles on which notions of performance rest — the ideas themselves, how they arose, how they might be developed and how they might be changed. This [chapter] attempts to locate the study of performance by using the same constructs used by researchers who have been attempting to categorize management. Having set out the results of this exercise we speculate on the ways the study of performance might change as interest increases.