1 W hat are some of the ways in which Vodafone could rectify its performance management system? Vodafone Italy experienced rapid growth in 1996 due to the explosion in the demand for mobile phones. In the period that followed, Vodafone grew from a flexible unstructured organisation of 60 employees into a company with 88 offices located in 30 Italian provinces

(Vodafone, 2012). During this period of growth, however, some of the unstructured ways of working of the early years of Vodafone remained in place and, for example, the Department of Technology underwent expansion with many technical employees promoted to a managerial role without an evaluation process. Therefore, the HR department introduced a performance management system in which each manager appraised subordinates based on a competency–

result matrix in a chain-

like process. Each individual was evaluated by their superior at the next level up until the highest level. This part of the process is typical in many companies; however, the communication system was not clear and worked across different horizontal levels, which caused confusion. As a result, supervisors were unable to define individual objectives and create expectations for subordinates. Individuals began to receive evaluations based on objectives and targets that had not been made clear ahead of time. Key performance indicators were not made explicit and as a result top managers made evaluations based on short-

term goals easily measured by numbers.