Performance Management: A Systematic Review of the Literature and an Agenda for Future Research

Abstract

Performance Management (PM), in all its guises, is a core business practice across the majority of organizations; whether this occurs formally through an official organizational process or informally through daily dialogue. Given its inherent importance our aim was to understand how academics have explored PM and therefore we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the scholarly PM literature over a period of more than 11 years, resulting in 219 articles from X different journals. The prevalent themes related to the role of organizational culture, the psychometric properties of Performance Appraisals (PAs) and the linkage of the PM system to other human resource management (HRM) systems; but what we saw was a gap in the scholarly literature as it relates to how we enact PM in practice. Therefore, we conclude with a suggested future research agenda to bridge this research-practice gap, with an emphasis on moving scholarly research from a focus on performance appraisal (or annual performance review) to PM.