(This article was also published on IE Business School’s corporate relations page IE Insights.)

Can performance measurement systems negatively impact performance? A recent study (“Performance measurement, cognitive dissonance and coping strategies: exploring individual responses to NPM-inspired output control”) suggests this, finding that employee behavior can change when performance is being measured. When subjected to such scrutiny, professionals sometimes rather focus on easily measurable tasks, while avoiding activities that are not measured or do that do not yield results in the short term. And that may harm the (long-term) performance of professionals and organizations.

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