Performance Management

Course Description

Performance Management proceeds from the premise that employees are commonly recognized as an organization's most valuable resource and that ensuring that employees achieve and maintain their highest performance is one of the most critical managerial responsibilities. UWF states the course examines best practices, current trends, legal issues, and research in change management, organizational development, performance management, and training so that students may learn how to effectively manage human capital for optimal performance.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MAN is the Management prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Business Administration, College of Business. It is offered at approximately 2 Florida institutions.

⚠⚠ Note what UWF folds into this course: change management, organizational development, performance management AND training. That is broader than the title, and it matters — UWF does not run a separate training and development course, so this is where that material lives. Students looking for training and development at UWF should look here.

Performance management is the HR function that organisations most reliably do badly, and the reasons are well documented. The annual appraisal is widely disliked by the people conducting it and the people receiving it, consumes enormous time, and frequently does not improve performance. A number of large organisations have restructured or abandoned theirs.

⚠ The course should therefore be read as being about a genuinely unsolved problem, not a settled procedure. The interesting questions are why rating systems distort, why feedback often fails to change behaviour, and what actually works — which is mostly frequent, specific, forward-looking conversation rather than an annual form.

The legal dimension is not optional. Performance documentation is the primary evidence in wrongful termination and discrimination claims, and inconsistent or retrospective documentation is where employers lose.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe performance management as a continuous system rather than an event.
• Distinguish performance management from performance appraisal.
• Align individual performance expectations with organisational strategy.
• Define performance criteria and set measurable objectives.
• Describe behaviour-based and results-based approaches and their trade-offs.
• Describe appraisal methods including rating scales, BARS, and MBO.
• Describe rating errors including halo, leniency, central tendency, and recency.
• Describe multi-source and 360-degree feedback and its appropriate uses.
• Deliver performance feedback effectively and describe why feedback fails.
• Conduct a performance discussion including a difficult one.
• Describe coaching and its distinction from evaluation.
• Design and evaluate performance improvement plans.
• Describe the legal requirements for defensible performance documentation.
• Describe the link between performance management and compensation decisions.
• Describe training needs analysis and its methods.
• Design training aligned to identified needs.
• Apply models of training evaluation including Kirkpatrick's levels.
• Describe transfer of training and the conditions that support it.
• Describe organisational development and planned change.
• Describe change models and sources of resistance to change.
• Describe employee engagement and its relationship to performance.
• Evaluate a performance management system and recommend improvements.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a real organisation or case study.
• Work effectively in a team with defined roles and deadlines.
• Present and defend a recommendation to a business audience.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify their output.
• Build a portfolio artefact suitable for showing an employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Performance management as a continuous system
• Management versus appraisal
• Aligning performance with strategy
• Defining criteria and objectives
• Behaviour-based and results-based approaches
• Appraisal methods: scales, BARS, MBO
• Rating errors
• Multi-source and 360-degree feedback
• Delivering feedback and why it fails
• Performance conversations
• Coaching versus evaluation
• Performance improvement plans
• Legally defensible documentation
• Performance and pay decisions
• Training needs analysis
• Training design
• Kirkpatrick and training evaluation
• Transfer of training
• Organisational development and planned change
• Change models and resistance
• Engagement and performance
• Evaluating a performance system

Optional Topics

• Applied case studies and live organisations
• Team practice and role definition
• Presenting to a business audience
• AI-assisted tooling and its governance
• Portfolio development

Resources & Tools

• The text the instructor assigns — Aguinis's Performance Management is the standard and is unusually research-grounded; Noe's Employee Training and Development covers the training half.
• SHRM performance management toolkits — student membership; sample forms, policies and improvement plan templates as practitioners use them.
• EEOC and DOL guidance on documentation and discipline — free; the legal floor under everything in this course.
• Kluger and DeNisi's feedback intervention research — frequently assigned; the finding that feedback sometimes makes performance worse is the most useful counterintuitive result in the field.
• ATD (Association for Talent Development) (td.org) — the professional body for the training half, with a student rate and a recognised credential path.
• Harvard Business Review's coverage of appraisal reform — frequently available through the UWF library; the practitioner debate about abandoning ratings, with the arguments on both sides.
• The UWF library's business databases — included in enrolment; industry reports and practitioner sources sit behind paywalls a student already has access to, and most never find out.
• LinkedIn Learning — frequently free through UWF or a Florida public library card; strong on specific tools, weak on judgement.

Career Pathways

• General and operations manager (SOC 11-1021) — the broadest destination, and the one most graduates reach through a functional role first.
• Human resources specialist (SOC 13-1071) and human resources manager (SOC 11-3121) — the specialist role is the normal entry point; the manager role follows experience.
• Training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151) and compensation and benefits analyst (SOC 13-1141).
• Project management specialist (SOC 13-1082) — and note that project work is entered from every discipline, not only from business.
• Logistician and supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081), purchasing agent (SOC 13-1023), operations analyst (SOC 13-1111, management analyst).
• Management trainee and rotational programmes — ⚠ these recruit on a fixed annual cycle, often a year ahead. Students who wait until spring of their final year have already missed most of them.
• ⚠ Florida employer landscape: healthcare systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola) are among the state's largest employers and run substantial HR and operations functions; hospitality and theme parks (Disney, Universal, and the cruise lines out of Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa) are operations-intensive at enormous scale; defence and aerospace (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and the Navy presence around Pensacola); logistics and distribution around Jacksonville and Central Florida; agriculture and food processing; and state, county and municipal government.
• Small and family business is a genuine Florida destination, not a fallback — the state has a very high rate of small business formation, and the SBDC network at Florida universities, including UWF, provides free consulting.

AI Integration

Management is being changed by AI in two distinct ways, and they need separating. The first is AI as a tool a manager uses. The second is AI as something a manager must govern — deployed in hiring, scheduling, performance evaluation and forecasting, where the consequences fall on people.

• Where AI tools genuinely help managers: drafting documents and correspondence, summarising long material, preparing meeting notes and first-draft plans, analysing survey and operational data, and rehearsing a difficult conversation before having it.
• ⚠ Where they fail: they fabricate confidently — including citations, statutes and figures; they do not know your organisation, your people, or your context; and they produce fluent text that reads as considered when nothing was considered.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Employment decisions are the highest-risk application, and this is not hypothetical. AI screening tools have been shown to reproduce and amplify bias present in historical hiring data. Under United States law the employer is liable for discriminatory outcomes regardless of whether a vendor's tool produced them, and disparate impact does not require intent. The EEOC has issued guidance specifically on this.
• ⚠⚠ Regulation is arriving and it is not uniform. Several jurisdictions now require bias auditing or candidate notification for automated employment decision tools. Where your employees and applicants are located determines what applies — not where your office is.
• Never put employee or applicant personal data into a public AI tool. Personnel records, medical information, disciplinary matters and compensation data must stay in controlled systems. This is a common and serious early-career mistake.
• ⚠ A human must own every consequential decision. "The system flagged it" is not an explanation you can give an employee, a regulator, or a court. Keep a person accountable, and be able to state the reason in plain language.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, and disclose what you used when asked. In a course teaching judgement, outsourcing the judgement defeats the purpose — which is a practical point, not a moral one.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Where UWF teaches training and development

• UWF does not publish a separate training and development course. The statewide inventory places that subject at MAN4350; UWF uses MAN4350 for Recruitment and Selection instead, and folds training into this course.
• ⚠ If your programme requires a training and development course, this is the UWF course to discuss with an advisor — and carry the description, because the title will not match the requirement.
• The reverse also holds: a student transferring a MAN4350 from another Florida institution may have taken training and development rather than recruitment and selection. The numbers do not disambiguate; the descriptions do.

⚠⚠ Why performance management fails, and what the evidence supports

• Feedback does not reliably improve performance, and in a substantial minority of studies it makes performance worse — particularly when it is directed at the person rather than the task. This is a robust finding and it should change how you give it.
• ⚠ Ratings measure the rater as much as the rated. A large share of variance in appraisal ratings is attributable to the person doing the rating, which is why calibration and structured criteria matter more than the scale design.
• Forced distribution ranking damages collaboration and has been abandoned by many of the organisations that popularised it. Know the arguments on both sides.
• ⚠⚠ What has better support: frequent and specific conversation, forward-looking goal setting, separating developmental discussion from pay decisions, and training raters — which almost no organisation does adequately.
• Documentation is the legal artefact. Contemporaneous, factual, consistently applied. A performance record created after a dispute arises is worth very little, and a glowing appraisal followed by a dismissal for performance is a case an employer usually loses.

⚠ Offered concurrently with the graduate MAN5347

• UWF teaches this course alongside its graduate counterpart, MAN5347, with graduate students assigned additional work.
• ⚠ The undergraduate section is not a lighter course. Lectures, readings and examinations are shared; what differs is the extra assignment load on the graduate side. Expect graduate pace.
• This is useful if you are considering an MBA or a graduate HR programme — it is an honest preview of the level, and the instructor is someone who could later write your reference.

⚠⚠ MAN3301 gates the human resources sequence

• Three UWF courses require MAN3301 Human Resources Management: MAN4341 Performance Management, MAN4350 Recruitment and Selection, and MAN4384 Strategic Human Resource Management. Together with MAN4402 Human Resource Law and MAN4330 Compensation and Benefits they form a coherent HR concentration.
• ⚠ MAN3301 itself is gated by standing, not by a course — 45 completed hours. So the whole HR sequence is unavailable until a student is roughly halfway through a degree, and the three courses above then sit behind it. Plan the sequence early or lose a year.
• Three of these courses are offered concurrently with graduate sections (MAN5347, MAN5351, MAN5331), which is a signal about pace — see the note where it applies.
• ⚠ If you want the SHRM or HRCI credential path, the sequence matters more than any single course. See the certification note below.

Certifications and credentials worth knowing about

• Human resources: SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management) and PHR (HRCI) are the two entry-level credentials. ⚠ SHRM-CP can be sat by students in their final year at SHRM-aligned programmes, and student membership is inexpensive — ask the College of Business whether UWF's HR curriculum is SHRM-aligned, because it changes your eligibility timing.
• Project management: CAPM is designed for people without project experience and is the realistic student credential; PMP requires documented leading experience and comes later. PMI student membership substantially reduces the exam cost.
• Operations and supply chain: APICS/ASCM CPIM and CSCP, and ISM's CPSM for purchasing. Six Sigma Green Belt is widely recognised in manufacturing and healthcare operations.
• ⚠ A degree and a certification do different jobs. The degree is durable; certifications are current, specific, and expire. Employers ask for both and neither substitutes for the other.
• Experience beats both for most of these roles. An internship, a student organisation officer post, or a real project you can describe outperforms a certification with no practice behind it — and SHRM and PMI both run student chapters worth joining.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — which matters in this prefix, where MAN2021 and MAN3025 both introduce management and only the second is upper division.

⚠⚠ Business programmes add a layer SCNS does not. Many Florida business colleges are AACSB accredited, and AACSB programmes commonly limit how much upper-division business coursework may transfer in — frequently requiring a substantial share to be taken in residence. A course can articulate under SCNS and still not count toward the major. Check the receiving programme's residency rule before relying on a transfer.

⚠ UWF states of its BSBA capstone that it "must be taken at UWF." Residency rules of that kind are common in business programmes and are worth checking early, because they cannot be worked around late.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with case analysis, team project work, and written and oral reporting. ⚠ Management courses are graded substantially on communication, which surprises students who expected a quantitative business course.
• ⚠ No fee notices appear anywhere in the MAN prefix, and no "permission is required" marking except on the BSBA capstone. Enrolment is gated by standing and by MAN3301.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision in the College of Business, and an online section of a team-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. A course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed — confirm with the department.

MAN4341 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.