Stakeholders and Support for Performance

IN THIS CHAPTER we focus on stakeholders and their responsibilities in supporting effective performance, another foundation block for improving performance in today’s complex organizational systems. Before we discuss stakeholders themselves, we must first set the context for effective performance. Next, we examine the primary stakeholders who are involved in most efforts to improve performance, as well as other stakeholders who may play a role, depending on the organizational setting and the particular performance involved. Then we consider the important factors that affect performance in organizations and the stakeholders who can provide those factors. The major topics for this chapter are

Performance and performers

Stakeholders in performance

Organizational factors that support performance

Performance and Performers
Stakeholders are the important individuals, groups, units, and organizations that make up complex systems. Before discussing stakeholders and their support for performance, we must be clear on what we mean by performance and performers. The mission and goals of any complex organizational system are accomplished by the performance of the people who do the work. Our focus in this book is primarily on the activities and interactions at the job/performer level where the work is done, as described by Rummler and Brache (1995). We do not focus in the same detail at the higher process level, how work is organized, or the even higher organizational level, the way the business is set up and managed. (However, many of the principles of stakeholder support apply at those levels as well.) Our attention is on the way that the organization’s work is done and on the people who do that work. Performance Effective performance is the goal of every organizational system. Thomas Gilbert’s Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance (1978) is credited by many with laying the groundwork for the critically essential analysis that underlies support for improvement of individual and organizational performance (Chevalier, 2003). Performance is a combination of behaviors by individuals, groups, and teams and the accomplishments (products and services) that they produce (adapted from Dean, 1999, p. 6, & Gilbert, 1978, p. 17.). Thus, performance is a combination of the behaviors (decisions and actions) of those who do the work and the products and services that result from those decisions and actions. For a successful restaurant, one very important performance consists of the decisions and actions by the chef and the food that the chef produces for the customers. Other examples of important performances (behaviors plus accomplishments) for that restaurant are managers’ purchases of supplies and the wait staff ’s services to customers. Performers The term performer refers to the individual—working alone or in groups and teams—who performs some work. This allows us to consider, as performers, those who work as volunteers or other contributors to an activity, as well as those who are more formally employed. In this book, the term performers is used to refer specifically to those whose performance is the focus of an intervention. At the restaurant, performers who are the focus of an intervention might include managers, the chef, all who assist her in the kitchen, the wait staff, the cleaning crew, and others.

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