A History of Performance Management

This chapter outlines the history and evolution of performance management, providing a timeline of important historical events and critical shifts in thinking during the last century that have shaped the way performance management is conducted and conceptualized today. The timeline begins with a discussion of the World War I era, which was really the beginning of widespread performance appraisal and spurred the creation of scales for rating job performance. Subsequently, the state of performance appraisal during the Great Depression through the 1970s is reviewed, highlighting the major focus on improving the accuracy of ratings as well as how ratings should be used and how the rating process is viewed by others. The authors then move to the end of the century and discuss the critical shifts to examining cognitive processes and then to the social context of performance appraisal that occurred during this period. The timeline ends with a discussion of the recent ‘revolution’ of performance management characterized by unhappiness about its current state, a debate regarding whether it is broken, and efforts to ‘fix’ performance management. Finally, the chapter concludes with a summary of important lessons learned throughout these last 100 years of performance management research and practice.