Designing performance measurement systems for teams: theory and practice

This paper reports on an industrially led research project, supported by the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which set out to tackle an increasingly pressing issue for organisations – how to measure and manage the performance of teams. In spite of the current interest in performance measurement and teamwork in industry, little evidence of team performance measurement systems (TPMS) was seen. Thus, started the authors’ journey into looking for a way to help companies to measure and manage team performance. The purpose of this paper is to take the reader through the investigations, with an emphasis on the analysis of current practice and research on TPMS. It describes a typology for TPMS design and identifies the gaps of current TPMS approaches. The paper concludes by claiming that a new approach to facilitate organisations design TPMS is required and by presenting a generic framework for TPMS.