Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 59, Issue 4
When you read this editorial the new decade will be well under way; but your editors are writing this as the new decade starts. Often commentators mark out such transitions by looking both back at the last decade and forward in anticipation of what the future might bring. We hope that you will forgive us for following such a traditional path. Perhaps one thing many will have taken for granted during the last decade is the inexorable rise in productivity and GDP within our economies – but the global recession has given us all pause for thought. In the UK the national statistics have just been released to show that the UK economy has finally pulled out of recession; the last major economy to do so. Across the globe we enter the new decade with the need for higher performance and increased productivity as a key economic and social priority to redress some of the damage caused by the worst recession since the 1930s. So the work of the journal, its readers and its contributors are very much in demand to respond to these challenging circumstances. However, we must also factor into our thinking that major changes will appear or become stronger as the decade unfolds and we have to react to these conditions with revised thinking. Global warming, resource depletion, renewable energy sources, and sustainability are just some of the issues we need to attend to if we are to build a stronger and relevant practice, and underpinning science, in productivity and performance management.
After the above lofty thoughts, let us introduce the four academic papers and the Reflective Practice piece that constitute this issue of the journal. Our academic contributions come from across the globe: Australia, Nepal, United Kingdom and the United States of America.
In the first paper Dev Raj Adhikari deals with performance management (PM)and human resource development (HRD) of individual employees in an emerging economy, Nepal, and looks to see how matters could be improved. The author bases his work on the premise that much of the existing HRD and PM materials are based on Western thinking. To improve PM and HRD in Nepal requires consideration of how such thinking fits the Nepalese context and leads Dr Adhikari to offer a framework to assist in this task. A feature of the new decade could well be that the dominance of western ideas, and economies, will decline and the type of problem treated here will become increasingly important.
Kim Bryceson and Geoff Slaughter concentrate in the second paper on the internal supply chain of a large vertically-integrated Australian agribusiness and address the problem of how to design an holistic performance measurement system than integrates the goals of corporate and operational business units. Integrating and coordinating complex supply chains will no doubt continue to be major challenges for our global economy in this decade and so the authors’success promises useful knowledge to benefit practice. However, Bryceson and Slaughter do state some caveats about generalising from their case study to other situations.
The pressure for manufacturers in advanced economies to move up the value-added ladder and cede the lower end of the spectrum to the emerging economies is well established and presumably will increase during this decade. Not so well known are the difficulties faced by the smaller company within an advanced economy wishing to move up this ladder. The literature often deals with the large company but they differ from those lower down the size scale in many key aspects. In general, smaller companies have a more restricted knowledge base, lower employee skills and limited financial resources. In the fourth paper Matthew Fulton and Bernard Hon tackle how to help small- and medium- sized manufacturers to best implement advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) in the UK. They describe a seven-stage methodology for assisting smaller manufacturers to make this journey and elaborate their experiences in applying this methodology successfully in 73 companies.
Jonathan, Andrew and Alan Westover investigate the connection between organisational commitment, job satisfaction and other key work characteristics for employees in a USA social work organisation. Their multivariate analysis,using factor analysis and multiple regression, highlights the role of passion as one of these other work characteristics. As economies, in particular advanced ones, migrate toward relying more on professional, knowledge workers within service sectors then aspects such as passion for, and at, work will become more important than hitherto.
Finally, we have a reflective practice piece, from Kumar et al.,that shows the use of lean approaches via a case study in a relatively new area of operations, e-tailing or online retailing. There is sometimes an assumption that anything “online” is intrinsically efficient – not so! Old approaches can be useful in new areas – just as new approaches can be effective in old ones. Sounds like a good lesson on which to end!
John Heap, Tom Burgess
