Performance Management in the Pedersen Company - A Case Study Example

How would you rate Pedersons performance so far? What does he still need to accomplish?

Pedersen made great strides in ensuring the integration of diverse professionals to resolve the diversity brought by the firms past decisions to hire people from different cultural backgrounds. He launched the Vision and Values Initiative to align the company's values in the vision statements with the general strategic approach to the business, and a new integrated culture that would accommodate all employees working for Shinsei (Pulakos 2004). He introduced teamwork as one of the values for Shinsei. The employees were also made to participate in developing the vision and values to nurture a sense of ownership amongst them. He developed competency statements to rank the new developed valued for the organization, where the employees participated in performance evaluation programs.

Pedersen also integrated and managed training programs, created succession plans, and oversaw employee climate surveys and performance evaluation processes. The training and hiring of employees and Shensei were centralized. Senior executives were required to undergo the New 360 performance evaluation system. Pedersen also introduced a new rating scale to a more developmental one that would reduce the psychological impact associated with the less than A or 1 ratings (Pulakos 2004). Pedersen relied on the new performance evaluation system as a fundamental change enabler in the circumstances of the cultural shift that was happening at Shensei. It would introduce extrinsic rewards and measurements in circumstances of Shenseis hybrid identity. It would also support enhanced transparency and integrity. Pedersen trained evaluators who would consolidate information from employees being evaluated, and later submit the feedback of the process to the employees. This approach helped him develop values for Shinsei and proceed to evaluate such benefits through the behavior of employees.

Despite these good initiatives brought by Pedersen, he still faced some challenges in accomplishing a fully integrated culture for the hybrid employees working for Shensei. Shensei was still confronting the initial perception of being an old commercial bank, making it hard to compete well with investment banks. This knowledge made it less attractive for new employee talent. Pedersen had to figure out how to differentiate Shensei from other industry rivals regarding talent attraction. Such a differentiation could be pursued through culture, pay, learning, or the combination of all these aspects. External recruitment had to be done to achieve high-performance culture, but it had to be accommodative to the long-term employees who were missing the senior positions filled by external hires.

Should the performance evaluation program be expanded? What questions should he consider in making this decision?

Pedersen should have considered expanding the New 360 Performance evaluation system to cover the work requirements for other middle level and lower level employees in the organization. Noting that there was the obvious conflict of cultures in the group before the creation of a new culture, Pedersen should have considered modifying the New 360 performance evaluation system for other employees. Questions included; what pay would every employee earn for specific performance levels? What would performance factors be considered before employees are promoted to higher job levels? What would priority levels be used to decide the promotion of equally competent/performing employees sourced from within the organization and those sourced from external hiring (Pulakos, 2004)?

What other initiatives can Pedersen engage in to improve working relationships between business units and to increase learning?

Pedersen needs to facilitate programs for evaluating the learning activities of new employees on-the-job. He can designate professional facilitators to teach employee group members some new techniques, interactions, and styles on-the-job. Pedersen can also consider conducting interviews to the successful work teams at Shensei to gain insights on the active processes they use to outperform the others (Pulakos 2004). Proper communication between the work teams would also improve the prospects of increased learning for the organization

References

Pulakos, E. D. (2004). Performance Management: A roadmap for developing, implementing and evaluating performance management systems. SHRM Foundation.