Measuring Employees’ Performance in the Public Sector in Sri Lanka: Testing of Two Models

Abstract

Performance of employees of an organization is a key concern of managers irrespective of their level and position. This is highly relevant when an organization is experiencing a down word trend or a standstill in their employees’ performance. Assessment of employees’ performance is required for effective performance management in organizations. However, a relatively little attention has been paid by researchers for the identification of an appropriate model of performance for employees in Sri Lankan context particularly for the public sector. The purpose of this reported study was to test the two alternative models of performance on their goodness for assessing the performance the employees of the selected public sector organizations in Sri Lanka. A sample of 200 employees was selected representing 11 public sector organizations for the study. Standard questionnaire was used for the data collection which assesses the performance on dimensions of the two models and both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were applied for the analysis of data. It was found that the role based model of performance recorded better model fit statistics over two factor model. The study revealed that the behavioral factors such as the job, career, team, innovator and organization are important aspects to be concerned in assessment of performance of employees. Both theoretical and practiocal implications of the finding emphazising on performance management were discussed.