In recent times, performance appraisal has been a subject of intense ideological debates. Performance appraisals have traditionally served as a mechanism to basically assess an individual’s performance in the previous year to reward employees in terms of compensation and career progression in the coming year. On one hand, organizations, at least the reasonably larger ones, need some systematic and transparent way to deal with employee’s performance evaluation. On the other hand, with more part-time and virtual employees entering the workforce on a very mission-based engagement as opposed to building a long-term career, the whole idea of formal performance management systems seems to be rather backdated. So, what’s the real deal?

The discipline of performance management has been relatively recent, and rather controversial. Taylor pioneered the subject with his famous Time and Motion studies that highlighted the notion of individual worker productivity, and demonstrated, rather successfully, how application of scientific management could be used to tremendously improve such productivity without exhausting or shortchanging the worker. His thoughts on The Principles of Scientific Management are a great peek into the social system and division of responsibilities between management and workers at American workplace at that time, and should be considered as just that – a journey in time where human society was coming together for the very first time to engage in large-scale machine-based manufacturing, and the theories and practices were still very raw and constantly evolving.

He criticized that the ‘best system’ at that time, the so-called ‘initiative and incentive’ management was really not the best because it relied completely on the workman, and, in turn, made management unconditionally responsible for this. His fourth principle states – “There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen, while in the past almost all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown upon the men”. He further writes – “It is this combination of the initiative of the workmen, coupled with the new types of work done by the management, that makes scientific management so much more efficient than the old plan”. While I believe Taylor’s intent must have been to apportion the accountability to the one best-suited to influence and ultimately achieve the results, thereby protecting the innocent workers for collective outputs beyond their scope of control or influence, I think this has also led to some serious long-term challenges. However, in an unfortunate way, in one sweeping shot, Taylor condemned an entire generation of workers to subservience by keeping them outside the decision-making process, which subsequently rose on to become an elite preserve of the new management class. This further championed the era of Fordism where ‘division of labor’ and moving assembly line lead to unprecedented growth in productivity, faster production times and worker wages, but also led to lower skill requirement from the workers. Here’s an interesting piece on this counterintuitive thinking from Henry Ford and Innovation, which was a marvel at that time, and literally led to creation of an America middle class and a culture of mass consumption: Continue reading →