Stressed Victim of Management by Fear ? Explain the bad performance to your Boss with Deming's Experiment

Performance Management Style is praised until today as the path to Excellency in all business and engineering schools [I should know as I did one of them] in the world and nearly every book such as "Corporate performance management. Measuring Business Excellence" by Bourne, M.,Franco, M. and Wilkes, J. (2003). According to them:

"Performance measurement is the process of assessing progress toward achieving predetermined goals, while performance management is building on that process adding the relevant communication and action on the progress achieved against these predetermined goals."

But what Quality Founder Edwards Deming did say ?

"A goal without a method is nonsense"

and

"We should work on the process, not the outcome of the processes."

Performance Management Style just violates the very foundation of Deming's Management Style which conducted Japan, still considered an underdeveloped country in the seventies, to the top of Industrial Quality Nations.

Education is clearly responsible for that as he said:

"The problem is that most courses teach what is wrong".

So he designed an experiment to explain what Managers should avoid:

"confuse special causes with common causes"

by accusing their workers for bad performances (which can tend to the Style of Management by Fear causing People's stress with Performance Anxiety) instead of taking the responsability upon themselves and lead the way to improve the system they have set up.

Various techniques are used to ensure a quality (no red bead) product. There are quality control inspectors, feedback to the workers, merit pay for superior performance, performance appraisals, procedure compliance, posters and quality programs. The foreman, quality control, and the workers all put forth their best efforts to produce a quality product. The experiment allows the demonstration of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the various methods. Some humor is also included along the way.

Describing the Red Bead Experiment has all the dangers of writing a good movie review. One does not want to give out the complete plot line in the description. Suffice it to say that at the end of the experiment, what is discovered is that several of the actions taken (which are commonly seen every day in the workplace) were detrimental to the employees and the workplace, and had no improving effect on the process. The concluding comments point out the hazards of misuse of performance data.