Individual and group performance is a function of several different components. Performance should first be oriented towards a strategy -- if the activities of the individuals or teams in your organization are not contributing to the organization achieving its strategic objectives this is a problem. Workplace technology and employee involvement are also important because they set the constraints on performance. Three direct factors in employee performance are reward systems, goal setting and performance appraisals, all of which serve to orient the behavior of employees towards their goals. The goals should of course be challenging and clear. The performance appraisal is one of the key elements in performance management, and consists of a number of individual components. These include purpose, identification and training of the appraiser, role of the appraisee, measures, and timing. How each of these is structured will affect the ability of the organization to measure performance and therefore to appraise it. In general, a good performance appraisal system will be timely, accurate, understood, feasible and it should focus on critical control points in order to orient the activities of the appraisee at the most critical moments of their work.

In addition to performance appraisals, rewards systems are a valuable tool in performance management. There are different underlying philosophies regarding rewards systems, for example whether the system should apply to an individual or be applied on a team basis. There are a number of factors that will impact the effectiveness of a given rewards system, including the rewards mix, the internal and external equity of the system and how the system is administered. Ultimately, the company benefits when the employees understand the system, when they understand the link between themselves and the rewards, and when the rewards system conveys a sense of equity and justice to the employees. If the rewards are insufficient, untimely, or simply not forthcoming, then the rewards system is more likely to fail.

In addition to performance appraisal, a company can improve its performance by developing talent. At its heart, talent development is about improving the internal capabilities of the organization -- turning good people into great people will have a significant benefit on the...

First, this allows the organization to recognize good people and give them a pathway to improvement and second it is a selling point to get good people to stay in your organization. At some point, this will morph into leadership development, where the best of the talent is tracked through a program specifically designed to improve the leadership and management capabilities of the organization, not just technical abilities.
At this leadership level, it is important to remember the value of mentorship. There is much about leadership that is a soft skill, and mentorship allows future leaders to learn from today's leaders, which is an essential part of the growth process. A mentorship program should have guidelines, though, so that its role in the organization is understood and that there is some formality that allows management to evaluate the program's benefits.

For all employees, it is important that they have a sense of what their future with the organization is, and that the organization takes an interest in the best employees. By providing resources, an organization can improve its retention rates, and with the other forms of training the company can also improve the quality of the workers and future leaders that it retains.

2.

The chapter 18 seems to have made a mistake, however, in charting the career stages. The method presented might have been okay for a baby boomer, but in the modern world careers do not simply project in a linear fashion. This may not be obvious to a reader who isn't thinking, but I found it odd that this theory is based on a career trajectory that nobody really has any more -- it's much more of wave, if you were to graph it out, and people tend to have a lot of different jobs over the course of their career. Many people have multiple careers. This is so common, it really should have been incorporated here, because the way the material is presented it seems like the author is basing a lot of the work on an antiquated idea of what careers in the 21st century actually look like.

3.

The material provided an introduction to the subject matter. That leaves a lot of the details unsaid, in particular with respect to…