Abstract
In recent history, meaning has been studied vastly and has also been predominantly found to be concomitant with work. Conceptions around work emanate from a process of creation, development and production and because the majority of people spend most of their time in the work environment, finding work-life meaning becomes fundamentally pivotal and central to performance. The overarching aim of this study was to explore the role of leadership and co-created performance management systems in constructing work-life meaning.
Performance management is the most popular and common way of motivating and incentivising employees, particularly to motivate them to keep performing and evolving. In South Africa, performance management systems are particularly put in place as useful tools used to harness and manage performance. Leadership has a critical role in ensuring that performance management systems are co-created, that both supervisors and subordinates are properly set up on how to use these and to ensure that developmental plans are taken seriously and are effected post performance appraisal.
In carrying out the study, grounded theory was the employed methodology to access perceptions of those intimately involved in carrying out performance management appraisals. Grounded theory was also used to avoid manipulating and using a lens of a pre-defined hypothesis. Ten participants were theoretically sampled. Data were analysed using the three coding stages; namely, initial coding, focused coding and theoretical coding and five categories emerged.
The findings showed that performance management systems create work-life meaning only when co-created and when there is receptiveness by subordinates on the non-threatening score. The main recommendation was that leaders in the public sector at large adopt the Monitoring, Reporting and Responding (MRR) methodology as an internal performance management system as it is co-created, allows for objective performance measurement in a non-threatening way and results in constructing work-life meaning.
Key words: effective leadership, performance management, work-life meaning.