Learning and Performance Management Learning

LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
LEARNING
Acquiring a complex set of sophisticated skills is a result of change that comes from learning. An
understanding of how people learn is very important because it will help people explain and predict
behavior.
Knowledge about learning is very useful to someone who cares about the behavior of people.
WHAT IS LEARNING?
Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge due to experience. When a

person behaves differently from what he previously did, it can be said that there is change in the
persons behavior. With change there is learning.
Change in behavior may be due to learning or other causes like drugs, injury disease, maturation
and many others. A change behavior is manifested by outward actions like frequent yawning.
Behavioral change starts with the mind when it accepts new knowledge. Sometimes the mind
orders the body to show some signs of behavior that is different from the previous one.
THEORIES OF LEARNING
There are theories of learning that help explain the learning process. They are:
1. Classical Conditioning
2. Operant Conditioning
3. Social Learning
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a
response that was originally evoked by another stimulus.
Classical conditioning is a learning process first discovered by the Russian physiologist Ivan
Petrovich Pavlov in the early 1900s. The discovery was accidental and happened while he was
conducting experiments on digestion in dogs. His whole experiment dealt with his experiment on
his dog Circa. He went on to dedicate his whole life to find out the underlying principles of
Classical Conditioning and also went on to win Nobel Prize for his contribution in the field of
psychology.
Classical Conditioning is a form of associative learning which deals with learning of a new
behavior via associating various stimuli. Classical Conditioning theory deals with the concept of
pairing two or more stimulus and then relating the output response with different stimuli.

SUBMITTED BY: MARISSA A. RIVERA/ SUBMITTED TO: DR. 1
ERLINDA D. MENDOZA, PHD,DPA
Simply put, an organism is conditioned in such an environment that it produces the conditioned
response from the conditioned stimulus. The conditioned stimulus is neutral prior to the
experiment. The repetitive trial of pairing the neutral stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus
leads to the neutral or conditioned stimulus causing the organism to produce the conditioned
response.
OPERANT CONDITIONING
Operant Conditioning may be defined as a type of learning where people learn to repeat behaviors
that bring them pleasurable outcomes and to avoid behaviors that lead to uncomfortable outcomes.
Operant conditioning can be described as a process that attempts to modify behavior through the
use of positive and negative reinforcement. Through operant conditioning, an individual makes an
association between a particular behavior and a consequence.
Example 1: Parents rewarding a childs excellent grades with candy or some other prize.
Example 2: A schoolteacher awards points to those students who are the most calm and well-
behaved. Students eventually realize that when they voluntarily become quieter and better
behaved, that they earn more points.
Example 3: A form of reinforcement (such as food) is given to an animal every time the animal
(for example, a hungry lion) presses a lever.
The term operant conditioning originated by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, who believed that
one should focus on the external, observable causes of behavior (rather than try to unpack the
internal thoughts and motivations).
Reinforcement comes in two forms: positive and negative.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REINFORCERS

Positive reinforcers are favorable events or outcomes that are given to the individual after the
desired behavior. This may come in the form of praise, rewards, etc.
Negative reinforcers typically are characterized by the removal of an undesired or unpleasant

outcome after the desired behavior. A response is strengthened as something considered negative
is removed.
The goal in both of these cases of reinforcement is for the behavior to increase.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE PUNISHMENT

Punishment, in contrast, is when the increase of something undesirable attempts to cause a
decrease in the behavior that follows.
Positive punishment is when unfavorable events or outcomes are given in order to weaken the
response that follows.

Negative punishment is characterized by when unfavorable event or outcome is removed after an
undesired behavior occurs.
The goal in both of these cases of punishment is for a behavior to decrease.
SOCIAL LEARNING
Social Learning may be defined as the process of observing the behavior of others, recognizing its
consequences, and altering behavior as a result. One of the ways by which people learn is through
social contacts with other people. For instance, an employee pays much attention to his boss, a
highly successful person, whenever he speaks or just plain moving around the office. The brief
encounters with the boss gave the employee the opportunity to understand and apply some ideas
shared by the superior. An example is watching boss perform the right way to communicate with
customers.
One of the most influential learning theories, the Social Learning Theory (SLT), was formulated
by Albert Bandura. It encompasses concepts of traditional or classical learning theory and the
operant conditioning of B.F. Skinner.
However, the theory strongly implies that there are types of learning wherein direct reinforcement
is not the causal mechanism; rather, the so called social element can result to the development of
new learning among individuals. Social Learning Theory has been useful in explaining how people
can learn new things and develop new behaviors by observing other people. It is to assume,
therefore, that Social Learning Theory is concerned on observational learning process among
people.
HOW SOCIAL LEARNING IS ACHIEVED

Social learning may be done in three ways namely:
1. By observing what happens to other people;
2. By being told about something; and
3. Through direct experience.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
It is the best interest of organizations that the performance of their members are well managed. To
improve employees; output and performance, there are available systems and procedures that can
be used. The task of management is to make sure that every member is doing what is expected of
them. How management will go about doing this task is the aim of performance management.
WHAT IS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT?
Performance Management refers to the procedures and systems designed to improve employee
outputs and performance, often through the use of economic incentive systems.

Apart from economic incentives, the other means used to improve employee performance are:
1. Goal Setting
2. Streamlined Organizational Structure
3. Better Technology
4. New Arrangements of Working Schedules
5. High Involvement of Employees
6. Better Motivation of Employees
Performance management is a means of getting better results from the organization, teams and
individuals by understanding and managing their performance within a framework of planned
goals, standards and competence requirements.
An effective performance management process considers human resource (HR) strategic planning
as a basic requirement. HR strategic planning is the process of providing capable and motivated
people to carry out the organizations mission and strategy.
PURPOSES OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Organizations establish performance management systems to meet three purposes. The purposes
of performance management systems are of three kinds: strategic, administrative, and
developmental.
STRATEGIC PURPOSE
First and foremost, a performance management system should link employee activities with the
organizations goals. One of the primary ways strategies are implemented is through defining the
results, behaviors, and, to some extent, employee characteristics that are necessary for carrying out
those strategies, and then developing measurement and feedback systems that will maximize the
extent to which employees exhibit the characteristics, engage in the behaviors, and produce the
results.
Performance management is critical for companies to execute their talent management strategy,
that is, to identify employees strengths and weaknesses, link employees to appropriate training
and development activity, and reward good performance with pay and other incentives.
STRATEGIC-. It does this by helping to link employees behavior with the organizations
goals. Performance management starts with defining what the organization expects from
each employee. It measures each employees performance to identify where those
expectations are and are not being met. This enables the organization to take corrective
action, such as training, incentives, or discipline. Performance management can achieve its
strategic purpose only when measurements are truly linked to the organizations goals and
when the goals and feedback about performance are communicated to employees.
ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSE

Organizations use performance management information (performance appraisals, in particular)
in many administrative decisions: salary administration (pay raises), promotions, retention
termination, layoffs, and recognition of individual performance. Despite the importance of these
decisions, however, many managers, who are the source of the information, see the performance
appraisal process only as a necessary evil they must go through to fulfill their job requirements.
They feel uncomfortable evaluating others and feeding those evaluations back to the employees.
Thus, they tend to rate everyone high or at least rate them the same, making the performance
appraisal information relatively useless.
ADMINISTRATIVE- Performance management can also support decision making related

to employee retention, termination for poor behavior, and hiring or layoffs. Because
performance management supports these administrative decisions, the information in a
performance appraisal can have a great impact on the future of individual employees.
DEVELOPMENTAL PURPOSE
A third purpose of performance management is to develop employees who are effective at their
jobs. When employees are not performing as well as they should, performance management seeks
to improve their performance. The feedback given during a performance evaluation process often
pinpoints the employees weaknesses. Ideally, however, the performance management system
identifies not only any deficient aspects of the employees performance but also the causes of these
deficienciesfor example, a skill deficiency, a motivational problem, or some obstacle holding
the employee back.
Managers are often uncomfortable confronting employees with their performance weaknesses.
Such confrontations, although necessary to the effectiveness of the work group, often strain
everyday working relationships. Giving high ratings to all employees enables a manager to
minimize such conflicts, but then the developmental purpose of the performance management
system is not fully achieved. An important step in performance management is to develop the
measures by which performance will be evaluated.
DEVELOPMENTAL- Even employees who are meeting expectations can become more
valuable when they hear and discuss performance feedback. Effective performance
feedback makes employees aware of their strengths and of the areas in which they can
improve. Discussing areas in which employees fall short can help the employees and their
manager uncover the source of problems and identify steps for improvement. Although
discussing weaknesses may feel uncomfortable, it is necessary when performance
management has a developmental purpose.
WHAT IS THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS?
Performance management is a management style that has grown increasingly popular. It involves
a process in which a company, organization, or institution creates a work environment that
empowers employees to work to the best of their abilities. The process that an employer uses to
accomplish this often varies from one business to the next. Despite these variations, the

performance management process generally involves some form of goal setting, evaluation and
reward. In addition, coaching is often offered throughout the process.
Performance management can be defined as a systematic process to improve organizational

performance by developing the performance of individuals and teams working with an
organization. It is a means of getting better results from the organization, teams and individuals by
understanding and managing their performance within a framework of planned goals, standards
and competence requirements.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CYCLE
Performance management involves much more than just assigning ratings. It is a continuous cycle
that involves:
Planning work in advance so that expectations and goals can be set;
Monitoring progress and performance continually;
Developing the employee's ability to perform through training and work assignments;
Rating periodically to summarize performance and,
Rewarding good performance.
PLANNING
"Planning" means setting performance expectations and goals for groups and individuals to
channel their efforts toward achieving organizational objectives. It also includes the measures that
will be used to determine whether expectations and goals are being met. Involving employees in
the planning process helps them to understand the goals of the organization, what needs to be done,
why it needs to be done, and how well it should be done.

MONITORING
"Monitoring" means consistently measuring performance and providing ongoing feedback to
employees and work groups on their progress toward reaching their goals. Ongoing monitoring
provides the opportunity to check how employees are doing and to identify and resolve any
problems early.
DEVELOPING
"Developing" means increasing the capacity to perform through training, giving assignments that
introduce new skills or higher level of responsibility, improving work processes, or other methods.
Development efforts can encourage and strengthen good performance and help employees keep
up with changes in the workplace.
RATING
"Rating" means evaluating employee or group performance against the elements and standards in
an employee's performance plan, summarizing that performance, and assigning a rating of record.
REWARDING
"Rewarding" means providing incentives to and recognition of employees, individually and as
members of groups, for their performance and acknowledging their contributions to the agency's
mission. There are many ways to acknowledge good performance, from a sincere "Thank You!"
for a specific job well done to granting the highest level, agency-specific honors and establishing
formal cash incentive and recognition award programs.
CRITERIA FOR EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
For performance management to achieve its goals, its methods for measuring performance must
be good. Selecting these measures is a critical part of planning a performance manage system.
Several criteria determine the effectiveness of performance measures:

Strategy Congruence
Validity
Reliability
Acceptability
Specificity
STRATEGIC CONGRUENCE
Strategic congruence is the extent to which a performance management system elicits job
performance that is congruent with the organizations strategy, goals, and culture. If a company
emphasizes customer service, then its performance management system should assess how well
its employees are serving the companys customers. Strategic congruence emphasizes the need for
the performance management system to guide employees in contributing to the organizations
success. This requires systems flexible enough to adapt to changes in the companys strategic
posture.

VALIDITY
Validity is the extent to which a performance measure assesses all the relevantand only the
relevantaspects of performance. This is often referred to as content validity. For a performance
measure to be valid, it must not be deficient or contaminated. On the other hand, companies must
use some measure of performance, such as a supervisory rating of performance on a set of
dimensions or measures of the objective results on the job.
Validity is concerned with maximizing the overlap between actual job performance and the
measure of job performance.
RELIABILITY
Reliability refers to the consistency of a performance measure. One important type of reliability is
interrater reliability: the consistency among the individuals who evaluate the employees
performance. A performance measure has interrater reliability if two individuals give the same (or
close to the same) evaluations of a persons job performance. Evidence seems to indicate that most
subjective supervisory measures of job performance exhibit low reliability. With some measures,
the extent to which all the items rated are internally consistent is important (internal consistency
reliability).
In addition, the measure should be reliable over time (testretest reliability). A measure that results
in drastically different ratings depending on when the measures are taken lacks testretest
reliability. For example, if salespeople are evaluated based on their actual sales volume during a
given month, it would be important to consider their consistency of monthly sales across time.
What if an evaluator in a department store examined sales only during May? Employees in the
lawn and garden department would have high sales volumes, but those in the mens clothing
department would have somewhat low sales volumes. Clothing sales in May are traditionally lower
than other months. One needs to measure performance consistently across time.
ACCEPTABILITY
Acceptability refers to whether the people who use a performance measure accept it. Many
elaborate performance measures are extremely valid and reliable, but they consume so much of
managers time that they refuse to use it. Alternatively, those being evaluated by a measure may
not accept it. Acceptability is affected by the extent to which employees believe the performance
management system is fair.
SPECIFICITY
Specificity is the extent to which a performance measure tells employees what is expected of them
and how they can meet these expectations. Specificity is relevant to both the strategic and
developmental purposes of performance management. If a measure does not specify what an
employee must do to help the company achieve its strategic goals, it does not achieve its strategic
purpose. Additionally, if the measure fails to point out employees performance problems, it is
almost impossible for the employees to correct their performance.


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LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior or knowledge due to experience. When a