CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

Employee’s performance management and appraisal is a subject of great interest in any organization. In every organization, employees play a vital role in determining its survival. In line with that, an employee is perceived as an important or valuable asset to an organization and is the key or prerequisite factor to make sure the operation of the organization or factory runs as planned. Employees become the heart and pulse of the organization and really important to determine the needs and expectancies of the client or customers. This is aligned with the purpose of performance appraisal in the contemporary approach which emphasizes on employee who has full potentials that can be explored and expanded. Employees can be used positively to sustain the quality of service or product of the organization. This is associated with the roles and responsibilities of the employees to perform at the highest level of their work competencies. Performance appraisal become more constructive and therefore the progress of the employees are improved. With the achievement of the organization’s vision and mission, employees can work together collaboratively with the organization itself based on the win-win basis. In this context, performance appraisal can turn out to be a good device to plan a better career path for the employees. The term performance appraisal are sometimes called as performance review, employee appraisal, performance evaluation, employee evaluation, employee rating, merit evaluation, or personnel rating. Performance appraisal is a system that involves a process of measuring, evaluating, and influencing employees’ attributes, behaviour and performance in relation to a pre-set standard or objective.

In this information technology era, employee performance can be evaluated using software systems. This will  enable information about the performance of employees to be easily evaluated and saved to database for future retrieval.

1.1 Theoretical Background

Performance management of employees can be seen as the systematic description of individual job-relevant strengths and weaknesses for the purposes of making a decision about the individual. In another term, performance appraisal is a process of evaluating the behaviour of the employees in the workplace, or can also be referred as a process of giving feedback on employees’ performance. It involves a very complicated process and various factors can influence the process. Therefore, the process of evaluating employee’s behaviour should be looked at as a reciprocal process or using a matrix perspective and not as a straightforward process. There are a number of different appraisal approaches/ methods commonly used in organizations with methods used has their advantages as well as disadvantages and there is no right and wrong methods or approaches. Consistency and focus on the usage of the approaches or methodology are crucial to ensure they are successful.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

1. Organizations still utilize the manual method of evaluating employee performance.
2. It is difficult and time consuming to retrieve employee performance information.
3. Absence of a database system to manage employee performance records.

1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to develop an automated Staff performance system. The following are the objectives of the study:

1. To develop a computerized system to aid in the evaluation of employee performance.
2. To design a system that will make finding of employee performance information easy.
3. To implement a database system that will maintain records of employee performance.

1.4 Significance of the study

The study is significant to the ministry of education because it will provide an automated system that will aid in maintaining accurate record of employee performance, it will provide a system that will enable information related to employee performance to be easily retrieved. The study will also serve as a useful reference material to other researchers seeking similar information.

1.5 Scope of the Study

This study covers Development of a performance evaluation system for employee management (A case study of Akwa Ibom state polytechnic, ikot osurua)

1.6 Organization of the Research

This research work is organized into five chapters. Chapter one is concerned with the introduction of the research study and it presents the preliminaries, theoretical background, statement of the problem, aim and objectives of the study, significance of the study, scope of the study, organization of the research and definition of terms.

Chapter two focuses on the literature review, the contributions of other scholars on the subject matter is discussed.

Chapter three is concerned with the system analysis and design. It presents the research methodology used in the development of the system, it analyzes the present system to identify the problems and provides information on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed system. The system design is also presented in this chapter.

Chapter four presents the system implementation and documentation, the choice of programming language, analysis of modules, choice of programming language and system requirements for implementation.

Chapter five focuses on the summary, constraints of the study, conclusion and recommendations are provided in this chapter based on the study carried out.

1.7 Definition of Terms

Appraisal: evaluation or a judgment or opinion of something or somebody, especially one that assesses effectiveness or usefulness

Performance Appraisal –  Performance appraisal is a review and discussion of an employee’s performance of assigned duties and responsibilities.

Training: The process of teaching or learning a skill or job to become more effective or productive in execution one or more task.

Employees: Refers to a paid worker in a private organization or public parastatal.

Performance: Pertains to working effectiveness, the way in which somebody does a job, judged by its effectiveness

Assessment: Evaluation: a judgment about something based on an understanding of the situation.