Appraising and rewarding performance

The quest to link rewards to performance has a long history. One of the earliest approaches, payment by results, was examined in Chapter 11. As jobs have come to require greater and greater amounts of discretion by job holders, and as the service sector has grown in significance, traditional forms of work measurement have become less and less relevant, and new approaches have been developed, frequently seeking to improve future performance. rather than simply rewarding what was perceived as good past performance. As a result many appraisal schemes have incorporated elements of ‘management by objectives’, and more recently, attention has been paid to so-called ‘performance management’ schemes that attempt to link individual objectives with corporate and departmental goals. At the same time many companies have been developing competency profiles for their jobs, and have consequently attempted to link rewards with the manifest capacity to carry out a good job of work. All three approaches can be found today in many organisations.