MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Performance management
union’s managers have been able to practise those skills. One
particular facet of people management is performance management.
Performance management
Dunlop (1990) asserts that the measures of performance of trade union
officials are the votes of the members. And this point has been made,
in a slightly different way:-
As far as accountability is concerned, the democratic/lay
structure in fact judges the outcomes of senior managers’ work
who are therefore exposed all the time to criticism of their work.
So there is, contrary to what some people say, a direct,
immediate system of feedback. (Interviewee F)
There is, however, no formal system for obtaining this feedback. The
usual belief is that this is particularly difficult in trade unions and that
point was certainly made:-
I think you could say that they are trade unionists and therefore
they represent the underdog and therefore do not want to take
action, I suppose. They would have absented themselves and
done a negotiation and the problem would not be thought about
until they came back to the office the next time to find that things
are not been done. (Interviewee J)
As was the suggestion that performance management in a trade union
is difficult not in principle but in practice:-
I think the area where there is the most difficulty is in terms of
performance measurement….. If you went to a manufacturing
organisation, how many washers you have made is a very easy
performance measure. It is easy for salesmen to see how many
sales they have made. Even when you get down to some of the
areas that we deal with, they have pretty clear performance
targets in things like the Inland Revenue and places like that.
That is easy to come up with, sort of thing. And they have been
able to devise those sorts of measurements, primarily driven
around the issue of performance pay. This was obviously a big
thing with the last government. I think it is much more difficult to
identify those sorts of things, measures, in negotiations because
you are never free to do what you want because you have got
the other party there who have got the money that you are after.
You sometimes get the most fantastic results for the minimum
amount of effort and other times you have tried everything in the
book that you have not got the results that you wanted. Now the
must be a way of measuring that performance, but I do not know
what it is. I am absolutely certain that nobody else in PCS does.
So if anyone ever comes up with an idea on that, that will be
tremendous and I would certainly like to know (Interviewee C)
175