Towards IT-Supported Management by Objectives - a Design Theory Based on Intra-Organizational Weblogs

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 via 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 MbOtool on a weblog-basis. Within our concept each manager and employee possesses an intraorganizational 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 employee’s weblog. Drawing on this, we construct an explanatory design theory for the problems above and for MbO-tools in general. The evaluation using the Principal Agent theory shows that our approach decreases MbO information asymmetries and increase objective-awareness.