Performance Management at the University of Ghana Job Analysis

Job analysis is very important for performance management process as a job cannot be evaluated without defining what a job entails and the duties and responsibilities of those that have been assigned specific job titles (Aguinis, 2013). Balme Library, has not effectively managed to implement job analysis as a component of performance management process. The library, cannot therefore, conduct an effective performance management. Employees in the library cannot be evaluated when it is not known what duties and responsibilities they are expected to undertake. Conducting a job analysis makes it possible to know the knowledge, skills and abilities that are required to perform in a particular job. However, this is not possible without a job analysis as it will be impossible to identify which employees to train on what skills or even the kind of training to offer (Suthara, Chakravarthib & Pradhanc, 2014).

Balme Library therefore, needed to perform a job analysis in order to identify the kind of training that its employees needed depending on the competencies that needed to be improved or developed. Job analysis is also important in setting up compensation and reward system for performance management. Employees’ compensation and rewards for performance needs to be proportionate to the kind of work that they do. Those with more responsibilities and more technical work should be paid better and should be rewarded better when they perform well. Performance management system should be able to identify areas where problems exist whenever desired goals have not been met. This is only possible when jobs are defined and when an area fails it can be attributed to poor performance from specific quarters.

In the case of Balme Library, this may be difficult since jobs are not defined and tasks are not assigned based on employees’ knowledge, skills, or abilities (SHRM, 2017). Undertaking the monitoring and control function in the performance management process therefore becomes a challenge to the performance management team. This results in poor performances whose main sources cannot be specially attributed to specific individuals. The incumbents are asked to note the frequency of the tasks and the criticality of the tasks. The frequency of the tasks is then multiplied with the critical ranking to get the importance of the tasks to the job. The products are then ranked from the highest to the least. This provides a list of all the tasks in a job with their chronological importance.