This thesis explores the question of whether Performance Management Systems (PMS) contribute to the managing of Executive Agencies (EAs). Exploring this question empirically in the context of the Jamaican public sector, it develops a realist methodology with methods, which are applied to the study of four Jamaican Executive Agencies (JEAs). Primary research conducted in 2011 through semi-structured interviews is combined with secondary research that considers both official government and unofficial resources such as reports (official) and newspapers (unofficial). The thesis is one of very few studies to focus on JEAs, one of only two studies to explore PMS in JEAs, and the first to make a focus on PMS in JEAs the primary object of study. It therefore contributes to a very limited literature, which is, therefore, both a strength of the thesis insofar as it breaks new ground, and also a challenge. It is a challenge because the lack of available literature on JEAs with which to relate. In order to address this lack, drawing on Historical Institutionalism (HI), Path Dependency (PD) and Policy Transfer theories, it argues that it is reasonable to draw on British literature owing to the historical influences of Britain on Jamaica, their institutional and constitutional contexts and, particularly, because the agencification of the Jamaican public sector has been based on the British Next Steps Model. From reviewing the British literature an Integrative Conceptual Framework (ICF) is developed. This framework incorporates those factors deemed as critical to the development of PMS in the organisational performance management literature, (that is, both management and public management), in order to harness the structural, procedural, situational and behavioural aspects discussed in the existing literature into a single framework. The ICF is at the heart of the thesis because it influences the methods used in conducting the primary research, and the presentation of research findings. It is therefore a major contribution of the thesis, and it is recommended that this framework could be applied in other contexts (e.g. in the private sector) and locations (e.g. in countries other than Jamaica) to analyse the use of PMS for managing. By triangulating the primary research findings with secondary data, that is, existing literature on the four case studies, the ICF is applied to generate a longitudinal aspect to the study. It is also found that PMS do contribute to managing JEAs, and that the use of PMS in JEAs has evolved positively over time for managing JEAs. The research findings discuss how PMS contributes to managing the four JEAs in terms of the different components of the ICF. Based on this, the study is able to add to existing academic literature, and make recommendations to practitioners. The contribution of this thesis to literature therefore incorporates both a conceptual and theoretical aspect, and also has a practical element. Both of these, it claims, could form the basis for further research.

This thesis explores the components of the MCSs in use by two Albanian Mobile Operators AMC and Eagle. The methodology used is that of multiple case studies; the study is interpretative, analyzing qualitative data, and has an inductive approach. There are three MCS frameworks used the Object of Control (Merchant and Van der Stede 2007), Control Package (Malmi and Brown 2008) and Performance Management Systems (Otley and Ferreira 2009). The empirical findings were gathered by using semi-structured interviews. Both managerial and non-managerial staff were interviewed according to their areas of expertise in MCSs. The findings suggest that the MCSs used by the two operators are highly structured as per the three frameworks, that AMC does not use any well known model (such as BSC, Tableau de Bord, Performance Prism etc.), whereas Eagle uses a customized BSC, and that the strategies of each of the companies are translated into action through the respective MCSs.

This thesis explores the components of the MCSs in use by two Albanian Mobile Operators AMC and Eagle. The methodology used is that of multiple case studies; the study is interpretative, analyzing qualitative data, and has an inductive approach. There are three MCS frameworks used the Object of Control (Merchant and Van der Stede 2007), Control Package (Malmi and Brown 2008) and Performance Management Systems (Otley and Ferreira 2009). The empirical findings were gathered by using semi-structured interviews. Both managerial and non-managerial staff were interviewed according to their areas of expertise in MCSs. The findings suggest that the MCSs used by the two operators are highly structured as per the three frameworks, that AMC does not use any well known model (such as BSC, Tableau de Bord, Performance Prism etc.), whereas Eagle uses a customized BSC, and that the strategies of each of the companies are translated into action through the respective MCSs.

Background – Over the years, management control has become an agenda in the research field, and new frameworks have been developed to study organizational control and measure company performance. Management Control Systems (MCS) development has gained attention with the trend of young, technology-driven companies becoming substantial contributors to the economy. Because of the sudden growth of communication channels, employee numbers, and unguided processes around products and services, informal control becomes inefficient, causing communication problems and eventually limiting company growth. Research indicates that adaptation of a well-functioning MCS overcomes these problems. Purpose – The purpose of this study is to connect observations of Venture Capital effects on MCS to the existing SME and MCS literature. Method – Empirical data was collected by interviewing participants within four European SMEs that operate in different sectors. Semi-structured interviews were set up with the guidance of the theoretical framework. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interview recordings. Findings – The study finds that case study companies commonly use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a practical implementation framework for Balance Scorecards (BSC). The short-sighted characteristics of BSC are in line with the nature of the SME environment, reactively responding to short-term threats and the financial-measure-focused VC interest. Agency Theory characteristics can label VC and SME relations. The research encourages addressing conflicting interests by redirecting focus to company growth. Since the adoption of well-functioning MCS assists company growth, this research suggests motivating and assisting MCS development at SMEs.

One issue that has been neglected and is gaining currency in the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) literature is the extent to which individuals consider OCB to be part of the job (OCB role definition). A recent meta-analytic review reveals that employees are more likely to perform OCB when they define OCB as in-role rather than as extra-role. However, little attention has been paid to the influences of organizational practices on employee OCB role definition. This neglect is of particular relevance because researchers have argued that how employees view their role obligations are likely to be subject to some purposeful organizational practices. Thus, this paper focuses on the effects of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on employee OCB role definition. This paper adopts multiple theoretical perspectives (e.g., social exchange, organizational identification, ability-motivation-opportunity, and trust) to understand how, why, and when HPWS cause employees to expand their job requirements to include OCBs like helping and voice. Using a multisource data collected at 4 waves from 208 supervisor-employee dyads in Taiwan, I examined the following: (a) the direct effect of employee-experienced HPWS on employee helping and voice role definitions, (b) the mediating roles of employee helping and voice role definitions in the employee-experienced HPWS and actual employee helping and voice relationships, (c) the mediating roles of employee social exchange and organizational identification perceptions toward the organization, as well as employee efficacy, instrumentality, and autonomy perceptions toward helping and voice in the relationships between employee-experienced HPWS and OCB role definitions, (d) the direct effect of employee trust in supervisor on employee helping and voice role definitions, and (e) the moderating role of employee trust in supervisor in the relationships between employee-experienced HPWS and employee helping and voice role definitions. The results confirm the direct effects of employee-experienced HPWS and trust in supervisor, the mediating effects of employee helping and voice role definition, and employee efficacy, instrumentality, and autonomy perceptions toward helping and voice, as well as the moderating effects of employee trust in supervisor, such that employee trust in supervisor strengthened the effects of employee-experienced HPWS on employee helping and voice role definitions when trust in supervisor was high than when it was low. Implications for research and practice are discussed. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis documents research encompassing the design of dynamic electronic performance support systems. Essentially, an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) is complex distributed software that provides on-the-job support in order to facilitate task performance within some particular target application domain. In view of the rapid pace of change in current business and industrial environments, the conventional practice of issuing a new release of Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) every few years to incorporate changes, is no longer practical. An EPSS is required to adapt to the changes as soon as possible and without the need for major code modification. This is accomplished by creating a design in which task specific knowledge is not hard coded in the software but is extracted on the fly. The design also enables a loose coupling among different modules of the system so that functionalities may be added, removed, modified or extended with minimum disruption. In this thesis we show how to combine service-oriented architecture with the concepts of software agents to achieve a software architecture that provides the required agility. Traditionally Unified Modeling Language (UML), which lacks formal semantics, has been the tool of choice for design and analysis of such systems and that means formal analysis techniques cannot be used for verification of UML models, whereas Software Engineering practices require analysis and verification at an early stage in the software development process. In this thesis we present an algorithm to transform UML state chart models to Object Coloured Petri (OCP) nets that have a strong mathematical foundation and can be implemented by standard tools such as Design/CPN for simulation and dynamic analysis in order to verify behavioural properties of the model. We show how to apply this technique to verify some of the desirable behavioural properties of the proposed EPSS architecture. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we have successfully implemented a prototype of an EPSS based on the proposed design.</p> <p>The main contributions of this research are: 1. Proposed an anthropomorphic architecture for a dynamic PSS. 2. Combined the concepts of services oriented architecture and software agents to achieve dynamic updating of task specific knowledge and minimal coupling between different modules of complex software to allow painless evolution. 3. Brought formal methods to the design phase in the development of agent based software systems by proposing an algorithm to transform UML state diagrams to OCP nets for dynamic analysis. 4. Modelled the dynamic creation and deletion of objects/agents using OCP net concepts and Design/CPN. 5. Proposed an architecture that can be used for creating families of agile PSS.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Extreme scale HPC (high performance computing) applications require massively many nodes. At these scales, transient hardware and software failures, as well as network congestion and disconnections increase linearly with the number of components. This volatility contributed to the dramatic decrease in applications' MTBF (mean time between failures). Traditional point-to-point transmission APIs semantics are ill-fitted to support applications of extreme scale. In this thesis, we investigate an application dependent network design that focuses on the sustainability of extreme scale high performance computing applications using packet-switching-inspired statistical multiplexing of semantic data tuples and decoupled computations. We report the design and implementation of a distributed tuple space using Cassandra and Zookeeper for tunable spatial and temporal redundancies without negative impact on application performance. We detail the various failure scenarios that can be handled seamlessly by our system and provide a description of the advantages of Stateless Parallel Processing for HPC applications. We report our results on performance, reliability and overall application sustainability. In the preliminary tests, for the most common HPC application categories, the prototype has demonstrated sustained performance, while providing a reliable computing architecture that can withstand multiple failure types without manual checkpoint-restart(CPR). The feasibility of efficient non-stop HPC enables aution-based cloud for more cost efficient HPC applications. For all HPC application categories, we first report a novel method for determining bid-aware checkpointing intervals using fluctuating cloud providers' pricing histories. Subsequently, we explore the effects of bidding in the case of virtual HPC clusters composed of EC2 Spot Instances. We expose the counter-intuitive effects of uniform versus non-uniform bidding, especially in terms of failure rate and failure model, and we propose a method to deal with the problem of predicting the runtime of parallel applications under various bidding strategies. We then show that CPR-free HPC applications require a new optimization strategy. As extreme scale HPC and auction-based cloud computing offer the ultimate computational scale and resource efficiency, they challenge the very foundations in computer science research and development. This thesis answers some critical questions about these challenges and we hope to pave the way for future improvements of the HPC field under increasingly harsh and volatile conditions. / Computer and Information Science

This study explored the design and development of an electronic performance enhancement tool that can assist a person with limited programming skills to create a variety of simple customized information management websites. In particular, this study was modeled after needs within an Instruction Technology department in which individuals were able to create pre-functional web pages with various elements such as textboxes and dropdown menus but lacked the programming skills necessary to add functionality to these web forms. Skilled programmers could add functionality to these pre-functioning web forms or create customized information management websites from scratch. However, programmers are not always available when needed. At the time of this study, there was no readily available way for persons to create customized information management websites without the services of a programmer or without needing to learn programming skills themselves. This study sought to determine what functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be included in an electronic performance enhancement tool to assist non-programmers to create simple customized information management websites and how a tool with such functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be designed and developed. A prototype version of such tool (named the Form And DataBase Interaction Tool or "FADBIT") was designed and developed in this study. This tool asks users who have created simple pre-functional web forms to answer a series of questions related to those webforms. Given the user's responses to these questions, this tool is able to form a metalanguage representation of the user's intentions for the web form and can translate this representation into useful programming code to add the desired functionality. The tool was successfully designed and developed using a generalized modular framework, and a Create-Adapt-Generalize model, with each module addressing one or more patterns common to web programming. The prototype tool successfully allowed non-programmers to create functional information websites for two structured evaluation projects, and achieved some level of success and encountered some difficulties with an unstructured project. Proposed modifications and extensions to the tool to address the difficulties encountered are presented. / Ph. D.

No description available.

Organizations have had difficulty managing the performance of their knowledge work teams. Many of these troubles have been linked to antiquated or inadequate performance management systems along with a scarcity of empirical research on this important human resource initiative. These problems are magnified when managing the performance of research and development teams because greater ambiguity and uncertainty exists in these environments, while projects are unique and continually evolving. In addition, performance management in R&D has only recently been accepted as important while individuals in these settings are often resistant to teams. This study represented the first step in the process of understanding relationships between performance management practices and perceptions of performance in R&D work teams. Participants were 132 R&D team leaders representing 20 organizations that agreed to complete a survey via the Internet. The survey instrument was designed to examine the relationships between performance measurement, feedback, and reward processes utilized by teams in relation to measures of customer satisfaction, psychological and team effectiveness, and resource utilization and development. The most important level of performance measurement occurred at the business unit level followed next by the individual level while team level measurement was unrelated to team performance. A simple measurement system with three to seven performance measures focused on objective results, outcomes, and customer satisfaction appeared ideal. Team participation in the performance management process, most notably the process of setting performance measures, goals, and objectives was also important. The use of multiple raters, frequent performance appraisals, and frequent feedback were identified as meaningful. Specific types of rewards were unrelated to performance although some evidence suggested that business unit rewards were superior to team and individual rewards. It was speculated that R&D teams function more like working groups rather than real teams. The focus in R&D seems to be on business unit projects, products, or designs where the aggregate of individual and team contributions determine larger project outcomes.