Giving Sense in Public Sector Organizations: Human Resource Managers and the Implementation of Performance Management System in Ghana

Organisational change has become inevitable in public sector organisations in modern times. Unfortunately, introducing and implementing such changes continues to be a quandary for change agents and administrative reformers... [ view full abstract ]

Organisational change has become inevitable in public sector organisations in modern times. Unfortunately, introducing and implementing such changes continues to be a quandary for change agents and administrative reformers because of the attitudes or resistance normally put up by employees towards such changes. It has been argued that resistance to change normally stems from the lack of understanding of the intended, as well as the process of change. To overcome this problem, some scholars have advocated that change agents must adopt different techniques, employ different leadership styles, and communicate very well with employees, who are targets of the change.
One technique that can have significant impact on employees in the change process, according to some scholars, is sensegiving. Sensegiving generally deals with how leaders use every available opportunity to appeal to the values of change recipients so as to enable such employees to accept the intended change. It is about how leaders may use different mechanisms to influence or alter the perception and behaviour of employees so that such employees will accept that the intended change is necessary and beneficial to both the individual and the organisation.
One particular change that has been difficult, and continues to be difficult to implement in developing countries is Performance Management (PM) in the public sector – and Ghana is no exception. Since the early 1990s, the government has, on a number of occasions, attempted to introduce a far-reaching PM system in the sector with the view of changing the sector's bureaucratic orientation towards a more results-focused one. These attempts did not yield the intended result; however, in 2013 the Public Services Commission (PSC) was able to introduce a more comprehensive PMS, which seems to have been accepted by the public sector.
One of the main reasons for the failure of the previous attempts is how employees negatively perceived the system and the failure of managers to address this negative perception. Thus, based on these, the present paper intends to use the sensegiving framework developed by Gioia and Chittipeddi to examine how middle level managers have been able to, and continue to, give sense to employees, and how they have enabled these employees to change their perceptions about PM.
The paper asks: How are managers engaging in sensegiving in their organisations when it comes to the new PM? What innovative ways have these managers developed and are using in the process? How are the managers creating a sensible environment to help organisational members understand and meet the expectations in the PMS?
Using the mixed methods approach and convenience sampling technique, we examine the process of sensegiving in two public service organisations and two civil service institutions. The qualitative part of the research is based on interviews with officials of the PSC, Fair Wages and Salary Commission, and Office of the Head of Civil Service and HR managers of the selected organisations, while the quantitative part uses questionnaire survey to elicit the efficacy of the process from employees of the selected organisations.