Performance management is a holistic approach to organisational improvement that integrates individual and organisational goals and fosters cooperation between supervisors and employees to develop a shared understanding of work expectations. The literature further clarifies a performance management system as having four practices – goal setting, performance appraisal, employee development, and rewards. The conceptualisation of performance management draws on the dominant HRM framework of bundles of “high commitment” work practices whereby an organisation involves employees in its goals and activities to promote their discretionary motivation towards desired outcomes and overall improvement. However, there has been limited research on fully theorising performance management with the four key components. Although some empirical studies have tested the performance management concept, they focus narrowly on only a few of these components. Moreover, empirical research has omitted the role of organisational commitment in explaining the commitment based mechanisms in which the performance management bundle operates to inspire employees to improve their contributions in a workplace. To address these gaps, this study proposes a conceptual model to empirically investigate the linkages between performance management and three employee outcomes of task performance, organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and turnover intention as mediated by two focal bases of organisational commitment – affective and continuance dimensions. These relationships are explored in the Thai Police Service. The mediating effects are based on the argument that satisfactory work conditions inherent in performance management may carry perceptions of both organisational care and support and also accumulated investments underlying the development of the affective and continuance dimensions, respectively. While both mediators are hypothesised to decrease turnover, affective commitment tends to increase task performance and OCB, and continuance commitment tends to be either unrelated or negatively related to both performance variables. Furthermore, because organisational characteristics in police forces are generally distinct from others, police culture was included in the conceptual model to examine the incremental contribution of performance management to changes in the employee outcomes. This research embraced three related studies. Four focus groups of 27 patrol officers were conducted in Study 1 to explore key dimensions of police culture and examine officers’ understanding of performance management practices. Having developed a written questionnaire to test the conceptual model, Study 2 surveyed 161 patrol officers returning 152 usable questionnaires in order to assess the meaning equivalence and applicability of the translated measures of all constructs (from English to Thai) in the model, and to determine their validity and reliability. In the third and main study, a revised questionnaire was used to survey 516 patrol officers, 454 of which returned usable questionnaires that were half split randomly (224 and 230) to enable the analysis in two parts. Based on structural equation modeling (SEM), the first part allowed the measurement properties to be re-explored due to questionnaire revisions, and then confirmed, using both respective samples. The second part was based on the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique for testing the conceptual model using the second sample. Overall, the empirical analysis shows that performance management not only accounted for affective commitment but also, to a lesser extent, continuance commitment. Performance management also was related both directly with task performance and indirectly through affective commitment, only directly with OCB, and only indirectly (fully mediated) with turnover intention through continuance commitment. Even after controlling for the impact of police culture and demographic characteristics, the predictive strength of performance management remained significant. The hypothesized relationships of affective commitment to OCB and turnover, however, were not supported. The follow up analysis revealed that the positive relationship between the former actually existed, but was conditional upon a high level of continuance commitment. Some of the major theoretical implications include the conceptualisation of performance management as confirmed with four components, a better understanding of the role of organisational commitment in explicating the high commitment mechanisms of performance management and the impact of organisational culture on the operation of performance management. From a practical perspective, organisations are encouraged to establish the holistic process of performance management to elevate employee performance and overall productivity and to emphasise voluntary and supportive aspects of the implementation of performance management to ensure its positive effects through affective rather than continuance commitment. For police organisations particularly, management should strive for interventions that reinforce values of progressive thinking, people-centred operations, and cooperation to supplement the performance management system. Finally, the conclusion discusses limitations and directions for future research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/254116 |
| Creators | Songaek Patcharawit |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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