The Unintended Outcomes of Performance Management Systems: Gaming in British Universities

Abstract

There are growing concerns in the literature about the deficiencies of performance management systems in achieving their intended outcomes and that they can lead employees to engage in behaviors that go against the outcomes intended by the designers of the systems. Despite calls to understand the negative outcomes that can unintentionally arise from performance management systems, little is known about what these outcomes are and how they arise. Using data collected from 65 semi-structured interviews with academics working in 13 research intense business schools/schools of management in the United Kingdom, this paper demonstrates how performance management systems can encourage employees to engage in a range of behaviors termed as gaming, used by academics to circumvent the systems. It categorises six features of gaming behaviors: gratuitous proliferation, cooking the books, hoarding performance, collusive alliances, pandering to customers, and playing safe. The paper then examines the distinctive features of each behavior and illustrates how the behaviors arise as a response to performance management systems. Given the widespread use of performance management systems and the close similarities in the way they are implemented in different public and private sector organizations, the derived categories are relevant to contexts beyond the university setting.