US China Joint Venture

Introduction:

Performance management is an important practice in any organization, performance reviews are important in that they help to determine bonuses and they help to reward workers and therefore motivate them. Performance reviews will also improve the employees’ performance in an organization. In this case we have a US china investment that will require taking into consideration the new business environment, different culture and other factors that differ with the factor in the United States.

Factors to take into consideration:

The organization should not set high performance expectation; it should take into consideration the time taken for the firm to adapt to the new environment, in order to increase the rate of adaptation an organization should take into consideration the performance reviews of the host country. A period of 6 months should be allowed to make sure that performance reviews are not biased.

According to Bowling (1990) an organization should adopt the performance review method used in the host country, further according to Black (1992) a good performance review should incorporate a team from both the home country and also from the host country.

There are also other factors that affect international performance appraisal, according to Lindholm (1999) the appraisal system will depend on the culture of the host country, for this reason therefore a firm should take into consideration the culture of host country before taking any performance management measure.

According to Dowling (1994) it is important to take into consideration the management part and the environmental constraint that may result to failure, wrong decision should not be made when failure is experienced and there is a need to find out whether failure is due to environmental constraints or management. Therefore there is a need to take into consideration the environmental business constraint that may hinder success.

Social cultural factors, economic factors and political factors should also be taken into consideration when undertaking performance review, in economically underdeveloped regions a firm many experience lower performance, also politically unstable countries may result to poor performance. In our case china is a politically stable country and therefore political instability will not be an issue.

The other factors include the firm factors which include the organization structure, organization culture, the strategies of the firm and finally the type of industry the firm enters, some industries may have high levels of performance while others may lead to failure due to competition or failure of the firm to adopt.

Characteristics of china firms:

Firms in china have harmonize the relationship between the peers and their subordinates, this helps in ease communication and also allows the firm to adopt to changing working conditions and the changing environment, employees in these firms are empowered and this helps improve performance. The firms have adopted a common performance appraisal but this is different with the systems adopted in the United States, finally the firms in china do not always consult the employees regarding performance appraisal measure undertaken. Therefore adopting the methods used by the china firms will aid the firm to adapt quickly to the environment and also performance reviews will match those of other firms in the region.

The performance review process:

Workers should at first be informed about the set goals and objectives and should also be informed about the importance of achieving these goals that may lead to wage or salary increment. There are three types of goals that can be set in an organization and they include the hard goals, soft goals and the contextual goals. Hard goals can be used to determine return on investment, soft goals are more character based and they report on interpersonal skills, finally the contextual goals take into consideration the situation in which certain processes occur.

The firm should therefore have set goals and objectives, this goals will be the basis for performance measure where achievement of these goals will be a measure of performance, there are various forms of goals which include the hard goals, the soft goals and the contextual goals, the firm should therefore set all these goals that take into consideration all factors in an organization, the hard goals will be a basis for determining the return on investment.

The first step is to identify simple reviews forms, these forms should also have a standard scoring, after preparing these forms there is a need to leave a large space that will be used to record personalized comments. The other important step is to inform the employees about the process and this will aid in motivating them in their day to day operations.

After the forms are prepared there is the need to keep records on a day to day basis regarding the performance of the employees in the organization, the goals of the organization should be taken into consideration when making these records and therefore will finally help in evaluating performance.

Performance records should be made in a way that they will allow rating, the rating of this performance measure should have a scale example the range from 1 to five where the number 5 stand for best performance while number 1 should stand for poor performance.

When the records are collected then they can be used to improve on inefficiencies, it will also help in determining the contribution of human resource to the organization, it will also aid in improving the human resource process and it will help employees to be more motivated and even more productive.

The model that would also be appropriate to evaluate human performance is the return on investment model, this method will involve turning the inputs and the outputs into financial figures, this process will involve the managers making estimates of the inputs and outputs into financial figures. The importance of this model is that it helps in indentifying the contribution of the human resource in the firm and also helps to compare the contribution of human capital and the other forms of capital.

Conclusion:

Having taken into consideration the existing culture of the firms in china it is important that we allow time to undertake appropriate performance reviews, this is because it takes time for a firm to adapt to the business environment in the host country, it should also be important to adopt performance measures used by host firms, it is however even more important to take into consideration the performance measures by the host country firms and also performance measures used by home firms.

 References:

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