The Ambiguity of Performance
Performance conversations are deeply embedded in organisational life. They form the basis for promotion, retention, bonus incentives, temperature checks, and, increasingly, the measurement of organisational well-being itself. Forms are completed, feedback is gathered, and employees are evaluated against criteria intended to reflect their contribution and value. In principle, these processes are designed to create clarity, support development, and guide organisational decision-making. In practice, however, the experience is often far less precise.
More often than not, performance questions feel ambiguous, expectations are not fully understood, and feedback is shaped as much by caution as by honesty. Very few employees will openly admit to having a genuine problem with their manager, particularly in systems where honesty may feel risky or professionally unwise. Employees are therefore asked to evaluate performance in ways that do not always align with how work is actually experienced, while managers are expected to make judgements that rely heavily on interpretation. The process presents itself as structured and objective, yet the reality beneath it is often far more uncertain.
Over time, this raises a broader question. When performance is assessed through systems that are not fully aligned with how work is defined, what exactly is being measured?
Despite the centrality of performance within organisations, it is rarely defined with the degree of clarity that its importance would suggest. Instead, performance is often inferred from signals that have gradually come to be accepted as indicators of contribution. Visibility, responsiveness, activity, availability, and perceived effort frequently become proxies for value. Individuals who consistently appear engaged or highly present within the organisation are often assumed to be performing well, while managers develop an intuitive sense of who is contributing meaningfully and who is not. Over time, these interpretations begin to function as substitutes for performance itself.
For many years, this appeared functional because traditional office environments provided managers with a continuous informal context through which contributions could be interpreted. Work unfolded in shared spaces, conversations occurred naturally, and ongoing interaction created opportunities for constant calibration. Performance, therefore, rarely needed to be articulated explicitly because it was interpreted continuously through proximity and observation.
Yet what appeared to be a functioning system was, in many respects, a set of organisational conditions compensating for the absence of explicit design.
As organisations shifted toward remote and hybrid models, the conditions that once supported this interpretive process began to change. Visibility diminished, spontaneous interaction became less frequent, and managers were required to make evaluations with fewer contextual cues. What emerged was not necessarily a collapse in performance, but rather growing uncertainty around how performance should be understood.
This created a significant challenge for HR and organisational leadership. Systems that had functioned relatively well in one environment suddenly needed to operate within a completely different context. In many cases, organisations did not redesign these systems to fit the new conditions of work. Instead, they attempted to preserve older processes and force them into environments they were never designed to support.
Research increasingly suggests that productivity in distributed environments depends less on location than on the clarity of the structures, expectations, and systems supporting work (Bloom et al., 2015). In many organisations, remote work did not create ambiguity as much as it exposed how much ambiguity already existed.
This uncertainty becomes particularly visible within formal performance review systems. In theory, performance reviews are intended to evaluate contribution, align expectations, and support employee development. In practice, however, they often reproduce the same ambiguity present in everyday organisational life.
Many review systems remain episodic and retrospective, relying heavily on managerial recollection, recent events, and general impressions accumulated over time. In the absence of clearly defined performance criteria, evaluations frequently formalise interpretation rather than consistently or comparably measure performance. Research on performance appraisal has long highlighted the influence of subjectivity, rater inconsistency, and perceptual bias within such systems (DeNisi & Murphy, 2017). Halo effects, similarity bias, and recency bias become increasingly influential when evaluation is not anchored in shared standards and clearly defined outputs.
The structure of the review process itself also shapes the quality of insight it produces. The types of questions organisations ask, together with the way responses are captured, determine whether feedback becomes meaningful organisational data or remains fragmented and interpretive.
Open-ended and highly subjective questions may encourage reflection, but they often generate responses that are difficult to compare across individuals, teams, or time periods. In these cases, feedback becomes descriptive rather than diagnostic. By contrast, when questions are structured, clearly defined, and aligned to explicit performance criteria, organisations are better positioned to identify patterns rather than isolated impressions. This does not eliminate nuance or human judgment, nor should it. However, it allows performance systems to move beyond anecdotal interpretation toward insight that can be understood more consistently across the organisation.
Even within well-designed systems, the role of the manager remains central. Performance processes are not self-executing. They depend heavily on the capability, engagement, and judgment of those responsible for applying them. A capable and invested manager can use a structured system to create clarity, facilitate development, and support meaningful conversations about contribution and growth. A disengaged or underprepared manager may rely on the same system in a far more superficial way, reinforcing ambiguity rather than resolving it.
This introduces an important layer of variability into performance management itself. Where systems rely heavily on interpretation, outcomes become shaped not only by organisational design, but also by the competence and readiness of individual managers. The effectiveness of a performance system therefore cannot be separated from the effectiveness of those tasked with implementing it.
This is where managerial readiness becomes particularly important. Organisations often promote individuals into positions of oversight without adequately preparing them for the responsibilities associated with managing performance, development, and alignment. When this lack of managerial capability intersects with already ambiguous performance systems, uncertainty compounds rather than diminishes.
Organisational approaches to performance are also shaped by leadership experience. Executives (often even more than HR) frequently design, preserve, or reject systems based on what they themselves encountered earlier in their careers. A leader who experienced a poorly implemented review process, for example, may come to view an intended approach as ineffective, despite the possibility that the failure lay not in the concept itself, but in its execution.
Over time, these inherited assumptions become embedded in organisational practice, influencing which systems are adopted, avoided, or prematurely dismissed. In this sense, performance systems are shaped not only by strategy or evidence, but by organisational memory and leadership interpretation. Executive instinct should not be dismissed outright, but experience becomes problematic when past conclusions are applied to fundamentally different organisational conditions without reconsideration.
It is important, however, not to mistake these limitations as evidence that performance systems themselves lack value. When supported by clearly defined expectations, structured criteria, and meaningful organisational alignment, performance reviews can provide substantial developmental and strategic insight. The difficulty arises when organisations expect performance systems to create clarity in the absence of a clearly defined performance architecture beneath them.
Questions for the sake of questions, and data for the sake of data, serve very little purpose. As broader performance management research suggests, meaningful evaluation depends on clearly articulated goals, expectations, and standards (Aguinis, 2019; Locke & Latham, 2002).
This points toward a deeper structural issue. What is considered strong performance in one environment may be interpreted very differently in another, while expectations often remain partially implicit and unevenly understood across teams.
The shift toward more distributed forms of work has made these issues increasingly difficult to ignore. Without the interpretive buffer provided by proximity and observation, organisations are being required to confront how performance is actually understood within their systems. This does not necessarily require more complicated processes. It requires more intentional ones.
At its core, performance must shift from something inferred to something explicitly defined. This involves clarifying what meaningful contribution looks like, aligning expectations across teams and roles, and grounding evaluation in shared criteria rather than isolated interpretation. It also requires organisations to view performance systems not simply as mechanisms for evaluating individuals, but as systems capable of generating broader organisational insight and informing meaningful organisational change.
In practice, this suggests moving beyond isolated, high-stakes review cycles toward more continuous and integrated approaches to performance. Systems that operate only periodically often struggle to capture the evolving nature of work, particularly within dynamic environments. By contrast, performance processes designed to operate longitudinally, building on prior cycles, maintaining continuity, and generating cumulative insight over time, are better positioned to support both organisational clarity and employee development.
Although such approaches may initially require greater investment in design and implementation, they often reduce ambiguity and administrative inefficiency over the long term.
Most importantly, no single performance model can be universally applied across organisations. Effective systems must be shaped by the context in which they operate, including organisational size, structure, culture, and strategic priorities. Standardised approaches adopted primarily for convention’s sake frequently fail to account for these differences. Ultimately, the effectiveness of a performance system lies less in its format than in the coherence of its underlying design.
Moving forward, therefore, requires more than simply adjusting existing review processes. It requires organisations to reconsider the assumptions on which those processes are built. The challenge is not merely to measure performance more rigorously, but to define it more clearly. In such structures, organisations may begin to question less whether people are performing and more whether they have ever clearly defined what performance actually looks like in their setting.
Sources:
Aguinis, H. (2019). Performance Management for Dummies. Wiley.
Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165–218.
Bracken, D. W., Timmreck, C. W., & Church, A. H. (2001). The Handbook of Multisource Feedback. Jossey-Bass.
DeNisi, A. S., & Murphy, K. R. (2017). Performance appraisal and performance management: 100 years of progress?Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 421–433.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
Pulakos, E. D., Hanson, R. M., Arad, S., & Moye, N. (2015). Performance management can be fixed: An on-the-job experiential learning approach for complex behavior change. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 8(1), 51–76.