Abstract
Management by Objectives (MbO) - invented by Peter Drucker in the 1950s is a leadership approach in which superior managers and subordinate employees jointly define objectives, constantly review achievement-progress and assess final achievements. IT-support for MbO is given within Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) or Employee Performance Management Systems (EPMS). Functions to constantly document achievement-status by employees or asynchronous communication possibilities for objective-discussion are not integrated in these systems. Thus, achievement-discussion has to be done with separate media such as email. Considering this, managers might lose track about achievement-levels and employees likely lose awareness of their objectives. To overcome these problems we interpret this situation from a Principal Agent perspective and conceptualize a specific MbO-tool on a weblog-basis. Within our concept each manager and employee possesses an intra-organizational weblog, in which he/she documents his/her objectives and corresponding status reports. Managers can comment on status reports and delegate sub-objectives via an automatic transfer of objectives from his/her weblog to an employees weblog. Drawing on this, we construct an explanatory design theory for the problems above and for MbO-tools in general. The evaluation by using the Principal Agent theory shows that our approach decreases MbO information asymmetries and increase objective-awareness.
Recommended Citation
Klein, Marco; Bitzer, Stefan; and Schumann, Matthias, "TOWARDS IT-SUPPORTED MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES - A DESIGN THEORY BASED ON INTRA-ORGANIZATIONAL WEBLOGS" (2012). ECIS 2012 Proceedings. 14.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2012/14