Poor Performance Case Study

Diagnosing the Causes of Poor Performance In order to perform at the highest level, an employee must be motivated and have a strong combination of declarative and procedural knowledge. If an employee significantly lacks any of these performance determinants, the manager must address the issue through the most appropriate performance management approach. In the case presented, Heather’s declarative knowledge has been clearly presented. However, her ability to interact successfully with students both during and after class may indicate a lack of procedural knowledge and the possibility of a motivation problem. With the right behavior approach to performance measurement, Heather’s manager could capitalize on her strong declarative knowledge,

She has a clear understanding of the information that needs to be dispersed to the trainees. She knows the facts and has done research on the skills that she is teaching. At the same time, she has displayed an inability to implement some of the very skills that she is teaching such as good communication and networking, which would indicate a lack of procedural knowledge. Heather’s inability to answer questions and be a resource to her class would also support this deficiency.

Motivation

Motivation could certainly be a factor in the apparent absence of procedural knowledge. An employee could actually have procedural knowledge, but choose not to implement the skills due to a poor attitude or lack of motivation. The choice to perform and the level of effort are both components of motivation (Aguinis, 2013). For this reason, Heather’s manager should

After completing a class, trainees could answer behavior checklists that would help the manager gauge Heather’s progress in each behavior. This could be instituted for all trainers and their results could be posted, ranking their performance against their peers. The manager could complete critical incident reports during monitoring to review with Heather and provide specific feedback. In addition, the manager could implement a comparative peer evaluation system among all the trainers. Brownlee and Motowidlo (2011) found that increasing accountability among group members motivated interpersonal contextual behavior and improved friendliness, cooperation, and supportive behaviors. The authors also suggested that any recognition or reward system be based on group performance, which was shown to encourage the same behaviors. In addition, it is likely that Heather’s motivation would increase if her peers were evaluating her efforts and her performance impacted the entire team. As an added benefit, Heather would gain the opportunity to shadow the best trainers and model their