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Dialog
Why We Should Stop Measuring Performance
and
Well-Being
P. Matthijs Bal
University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
In work and organizational psychology research, there are
usually two relevant outcomes: performance and well-
being (Kozlowski, Chen, & Salas, 2017). This is notable
not only in theoretical models, and in the choice of
variables when collecting data, but also more implicitly in
thinking, in personal and professional ideologies. On the
one hand, it has been argued widely that the sole purpose
of individuals in the workplace is to enhance the perform-
ance of organizations (see, e. g., Dalal, 2005). If organ-
izations are not profitable, they go bankrupt and people
lose their jobs. Hence, it is important to focus on perform-
ance, because it is the glue that holds everything together,
and ultimately our capitalist system depends on it.
On the other hand, it is widely acknowledged that the
focus on organizational performance is insufficient and
that it is also worthwhile to promote employee well-being
(see, e. g., van de Voorde et al., 2012). Well-being is a
convenient concept, because nobody can be against it and
it is universally applicable; almost everyone will be in
agreement that well-being is important. Positive psychol-
ogy goes even one step further and claims that we should
be focusing on happiness (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). People
should follow their dreams and passions so that they can
be happy, and this can be found at work. There are also
pragmatists, who believe that organizations can achieve
both high performance and well-being, and scholars
should strive toward this. This entails a utopia where
organizations function well and where people are highly
performing and feeling healthy, happy, and vigorous.
So what is the problem? The most fundamental prob-
lem is the lack of critical thinking toward these concepts,
as they are merely taken for granted in research. How-
ever, we as work and organizational psychologists (WOPs)
hardly ever discuss what the effects are of our narrow
focus on performance and well-being. In this essay I argue
that there are fundamental problems not only with
performance, but also with well-being. One could even
argue that inclusion of well-being legitimizes a perform-
ance paradigm, as it allows one to counteract any critique
on performance by postulating that there is a lot of
research on employee well-being (see, e. g., Bal & Dóci,
2018, Dóci & Bal, 2018). Hence, a critique of performance
in our field cannot be conducted without taking well-
being into account.
This following piece will provocatively explain why we
should stop measuring performance and well-being. I
speak as a WOP myself, being part of the community and
speaking to other WOP scholars. I will also present some
alternatives, because we need to know what to do if we no
longer have to worry about measuring performance and
well-being in our research. Yet, I wish to emphasize that I
am not against performance or well-being as such.
Performance and well-being are important, but we are
currently obsessed with it and have therefore developed a
tunnel vision (i. e., performance and well-being are the
only outcomes that matter at work; see, e. g., Kozlowski et
al., 2017), and we have stopped being critical of our own
concepts.
The Myopic Focus of WOP on
Performance
WOP research has incorporated performance as the
ultimate outcome of our research; any concept in the
field, such as an HR system, mindfulness, job crafting,
bullying, or psychological contract, aims to explain var-
iance in performance. Individual performance is impor-
tant, as the assumption is that it will lead to organizational
performance, and by extension, that individual and team
performance equal organizational performance. However,
it is overlooked that this obsession with performance has
been complicit in a wide range of societal problems. While
performance for a (private) organization equals profit-
Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie (2020), 64 (3), 196–215 © 2020 Hogrefe Verlag
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/pdf/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333 - P. Matthijs Bal <mbal@lincoln.ac.uk> - Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:52:57 AM - IP Address:145.15.244.31
ability and shareholder value, it ultimately instrumental-
izes anything for the pursuit of these goals. This is
inherent to capitalism, as capitalism can only exist by
eternal economic growth, which makes anything in the
world instrumental to it (Žižek, 2014). Consequently, our
planet, animals, and people are sacrificed for the pursuit
of profit and thus organizational performance. Our global
neo-colonial system is maintained, where in the Global
South millions of people live in poverty and where
children have to work in the most horrific circumstances
because profit needs to be generated (Stiglitz, 2012). Why
is performance then so problematic that it leads to global
exploitation of our planet, people, and animals?
Some Problems With Performance
The main problem is that performance in itself does not
have an intrinsic meaning. Performance is purely utili-
tarian: It is instrumental and can be used in any context to
denote behavior as a “performance”without any judg-
ment of its content. Performance is usually measured as
doing what is in someone’s task description, regardless of
whether this is actually the right thing to do. Meaning is
not self-evident; it has to be theorized and explicitly
included in how performance is measured. Without this,
performance is merely instrumental to profitability and
thereby its abuse is legitimized for the sake of exploita-
tion. This is also due to the hegemonic functionalist–
positivist tradition of WOP, which causes us to believe
that performance is merely descriptive and not normative.
However, we simply cannot measure the in-role perform-
ance of bankers and perceive it as something inherently
good, when at the same time their performance may
include offshoring profits to tax havens. This has no
intrinsic human value.
By extension, it has often been overlooked that a
myopic focus on performance has a range of perverse
effects. It does not only contribute and legitimize exploi-
tation around the world, but it also may lead to abuse and
competition in the workplace. When performance is all
that matters, anything is permitted, as the question
pertains not to how (i. e., at what costs) performance is
achieved (for an organization, management, or society),
but merely how high the performance is. In achieving high
performance, little is asked about the externalities of this
focus on performance. When managers prioritize per-
formance above anything, they may abuse subordinates
or bully others. Employees have to outperform other
individuals. Our way of conceptualizing performance does
not promote collaboration but is always aimed at compet-
ing with each other and at being the best.
Looking at how performance is measured does not
directly show an intrinsic meaning of performance. First,
the analysis of performance at work tends to be cross-
sectional and thus comparative. The performance of a
number of individuals at work (or teams or organizations)
is measured and compared with other individuals and
then related to a predictor. In this way, performance is by
definition comparative: It is determined why and how
high-performers are “better”than others. By extension, it
also supports authoritarian views of workplaces. For
instance, the most well-known (individual) performance
measure of Williams and Anderson (1991; more than
6,500 citations in Google Scholar), includes items such
as: “adequately completes assigned duties”and “per-
forms tasks that are expected of him/her.”Such items
measure compliance but do not measure whether work
behavior leads to greater dignity of people, organizations,
and the planet. It does not ask people to reflect on the
intrinsic meaning of their work. It merely asks whether
they do what their organization tells them to do.
One might argue that there are many new forms of
performance, such as creativity, proactive behavior, Or-
ganizational Citizenship Behaviors, and job crafting.
These performance indicators explicitly move beyond
the dictated, top–down nature of performance. Yet, it does
not make them less harmful in their ideological nature.
On the one hand, they represent a creative way to
broaden the terminology of instrumental performance-
related concepts. On the other hand, it is precisely
because employees are today expected to be creative and
proactive that the boundaries of what is legally and
ethically possible are tested (e. g., bankers who were
pushed to be “creative”and designed the financial
innovations that contributed to the economic crisis of
2008; Stiglitz, 2012).
A standard response to the aforementioned criticism
would be that this focus on performance is in itself not too
bad, as long as it is not detrimental for employee well-
being. However, this trade-off between performance and
well-being is part of the very problem, as it does not
address the inherent problem of performance (e. g., lack
of intrinsic meaning), and it positions and thereby legiti-
mizes well-being as the ultimate priority of WOP. How-
ever, a myopic focus on well-being is not without prob-
lems either.
Some Problems With Well-Being
Well-being at work can be measured in multiple ways,
including direct measures (e. g., health and subjective
well-being) and indirect measures (e. g., organizational
commitment or work engagement). Usually, well-being is
Dialog 197
© 2020 Hogrefe Verlag Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie (2020), 64 (3), 196–215
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/pdf/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333 - P. Matthijs Bal <mbal@lincoln.ac.uk> - Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:52:57 AM - IP Address:145.15.244.31
investigated in WOP research because it is a precursor of
performance. This is quite prominent in indirect meas-
ures, such as organizational commitment. These are
primarily of interest due to their instrumental nature,
while it is much less clear why organizational commit-
ment would be beneficial for human beings. Direct well-
being measures are less problematic in this regard. With
fields of research on this topic, and entire journals filled
with research on this (e. g., Work &Stress, Journal of
Occupational Health Psychology), it seems that the field as
such has legitimized its own existence.
Well-being research is important in many different
ways (e. g., well-being for a child working in a tin mine has
a fundamentally different meaning than for a Western
white-collar worker). Well-being is also an important
outcome of power struggles and structural exploitation.
However, this reveals the problem of WOP: The more
problematic and contested aspects in the workplace, such
as power and exploitation, are usually neglected. By
contrast, well-being has been integrated in the capitalist
neoliberal performance paradigm as discussed earlier in
this essay and elsewhere (Bal, 2017; Bal & Dóci, 2018).
This perspective on well-being co-aligns with our current
dominant perspective on society, where well-being is
praised as inherently good in itself, the ultimate goal of
life, and at the same time as this never-realizable fantasy
that motivates us perpetually to do more and more.
What we observe here is the first limitation of well-
being: We do not think about the state of high well-being
and its (philosophical) implications. Psychology has tradi-
tionally favored the negative aspects of well-being, as its
dynamics are clear: People feel miserable and something
needs to happen. But what happens when we have
reached a state of high well-being? What does it bring us?
Does high well-being mean more quality of life? The
absence of readily available answers in our work denotes
that we do not really think about these issues, as they
might indicate that well-being in itself is a flawed
objective, despite current wisdom in WOP.
And there are also more general problems with priori-
tizing well-being in WOP research. As long as employee
well-being is optimal, WOP-scholars have “succeeded.”
Hence, it is no problem to prioritize people over the
planet, and that is the explanation for why there are no
fundamental problems in researching oil company em-
ployees: They show us how important it is to treat
employees well, and to protect their well-being. That they
at the same time destroy our natural resources and the
planet is not of concern, because the wealth they have
accumulated by exploiting our natural resources enables
them to build up well-functioning HR systems that are
exemplary for work and teaching in WOP.
But even when well-being could be achieved without
externalities, it still has its inherent flaws. Most funda-
mentally, it neglects human life as it is. Life on earth
involves suffering, and suffering is a central aspect of
human life. Every day since humans have existed on the
planet, wars have been fought, disease has wiped out
whole populations, and injury, rape, sickness, death, and
emotional suffering have been a part of our everyday
experiences. It is a fallacy to assume that by focusing on
enhancing well-being (at work), suffering can actually be
taken away. A narrow focus on well-being is too limited to
understand what it is to be a human at work.
It is also ascertained that a lack of well-being indicates
a“problem”: When people do not experience optimal
well-being, there is something that needs to be “fixed.”
Notwithstanding the potential impossibility of fixing this,
high well-being in itself does not necessarily indicate a
solution. Well-being is also affected by cognitive disso-
nance, as people could tell themselves that they should be
feeling well. This creates the perpetual paradox of
contemporary society where people search for well-being
and happiness, but because they never find real well-
being and happiness, continue to long and search for it
(Cabanas & Illouz, 2019).
Moreover, the importance of lack of well-being is also
overlooked. Well-being may be beyond an individual’s
control (which is the case with many illnesses). To
indicate lack of well-being as a “problem that needs to be
fixed”overestimates the possibility to enhance well-
being, especially among those whose well-being is beyond
their control. More fundamentally, a lack of well-being is
enormously important in the wider social context. De-
pression is a necessary state of affairs in contemporary
society, just as burnout is in the contemporary workplace.
Hence, the question is not how to “solve”depression and
burnout, and how to fix people who experience burnout,
but the right question should be: What does the burnout
epidemic tell us about the contemporary workplace? Lack of
well-being is important, not just to understand that well-
being is not an individual experience but as a necessary
step toward societal change. In other words, depression is
informative, not merely to indicate that people have to
protect their well-being, but to understand the severity of
our predicament. In the context of climate change, ever-
increasing income inequality, populism, neoliberalism,
and individualism (Bal, 2017), it could even be argued
that we have a duty to have depression, to understand the
severity of our societal predicament.
Depression and burnout are therefore also symptoms of
“disavowal:”We know that our ways of life give us
material richness but they also bring with them destruc-
tion of the planet and exploitation of people worldwide,
yet we nonetheless continue doing what we do (Žižek,
198 Dialog
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https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/pdf/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333 - P. Matthijs Bal <mbal@lincoln.ac.uk> - Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:52:57 AM - IP Address:145.15.244.31
1989). Our ways of living and working are unsustainable
and destroying the planet, but we persist in them because
we do not see how we can get out of this situation. Hence,
feelings of depression serve an important purpose, as they
direct individuals toward the feelings of guilt inherent to
contemporary working. While depression obviously may
have various deleterious effects, it cannot be underesti-
mated and treated as a merely individualized phenomen-
on that should be individually managed (with medicine or
therapy).
Some Alternatives
Organizations cannot exist without performance and well-
being. People need to be able to perform for an organ-
ization to exist, and people need well-being to do their
jobs. However, organizations cannot not exist in the long
run when the planet is depleted of its resources. Organ-
izations have no right to exist if they exploit natural
resources, the environment, people, and animals. Yet,
they do, and WOP scholars ignore these tensions in their
focus on performance and employee well-being. This is
also due to WOP scholars having a rather limited implicit
theory of the firm as an economic entity that merely exists
for profit (Melé, 2012). Is there a way out?
What is needed is the introduction of new ways of
thinking about the outcomes of WOP research. It is
important to state that outcomes is a positivistic term.
However, we need to debate the focus of our research, or
what we want to contribute to in relation to our stake-
holders, including society. First, work has a much broader
meaning to people than merely to produce and serve
corporate interests. However, we have to move beyond
trite and hegemonic conceptualizations of meaningful
work, toward a re-evaluation of work as an intrinsic
activity, and valued as such by WOP scholars (Lefkowitz,
2008).
However, work is not just about the individual perform-
ing it and meaningfulness, since meaning (in life) does not
have to be derived from having a job. More importantly,
as WOP scholars we need to ask ourselves what is
currently needed in our societies and workplaces, and
subsequently we should focus on these issues. First, we
know that business in neoliberal capitalism is largely
responsible for the continuous high carbon emissions and
destruction of the planet. We need to investigate how
work behavior contributes to protection and restoration of
the planet, thereby radically going beyond limited con-
cepts such as pro-environmental behavior, and to inves-
tigate how individuals and collectives may contribute to
protection and restoration of the planet. The same argu-
ment could be made for social injustice, racism, inequal-
ity, neoliberalism, individualism, and others: Many more
radical questions are needed.
Thus, alternative outcomes are desperately needed,
such as how individuals can contribute to greater social
cohesion (in the workplace and beyond), protection of
people in- and outside organizations, social belonging,
vibrant and inclusive communities, and so on. To do so,
we have to stop letting organizations dictate research
agendas. Well-meaning scholars often talk about the
research–practice gap. However, bridging this gap does
not mean simply implementing organizational agendas in
research and focusing on narrow organizational goals
such as performance and employee well-being. Editors
and reviewers should reject papers that are merely study-
ing these trite outcomes linking them to whatever pre-
dictor.
Frameworks that could be informative are Melé’s
(2012) work on firms as “communities of persons”and
my work on workplace dignity (Bal, 2017; Bal & De Jong,
2017, 2018). For instance, the concept of workplace
dignity describes how everything that is part of the
workplace has its intrinsic, inviolable worth and meaning,
including people, animals, the environment, natural re-
sources, buildings, tools, and finance. If it is acknowl-
edged that everything has an intrinsic worth, new ques-
tions can be raised. For instance, research could inves-
tigate how cultures within organizations can be created
where questions about the protection of dignity are
normalized, and where people can work toward organiza-
tions that actively protect and promote the intrinsic worth
of people and the planet. In sum, WOP scholars are
invited to think much more creatively about the outcomes
of research, and about what truly matters for individuals
and society.
References
Bal, M. (2017). Dignity in the workplace: New theoretical perspec-
tives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Bal, P. M., & De Jong, S. B. (2017). From human resource
management to human dignity development: A dignity perspec-
tive on HRM and the role of workplace democracy. In M. Kostera
& M. Pirson (Eds.), Dignity and organizations (pp. 173 –195).
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan.
Bal, P. M., & De Jong, S. B. (2018). Create more value for all: A
human dignity oriented approach to consulting. In G. Manville,
O. Matthias, & J. Campbell (Eds.), Management consultancy
insights and real consultancy projects (pp. 39 –50). Abingdon,
UK: Routledge.
Bal, P. M., & Dóci, E. (2018). Neoliberal ideology in work and
organizational psychology. European Journal of Work and
Organizational Psychology, 27, 536–548.
Dialog 199
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https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/pdf/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333 - P. Matthijs Bal <mbal@lincoln.ac.uk> - Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:52:57 AM - IP Address:145.15.244.31
Cabanas, E., & Illouz, E. (2019). Manufacturing happy citizens: How
the science and industry of happiness control our lives. Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dalal, R. S. (2005). A meta-analysis of the relationship between
organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work
behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology,90(6), 1241–1255.
Dóci, E., & Bal, P. M. (2018). Ideology in work and organizational
psychology: The responsibility of the researcher. European
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Kozlowski, S. W., Chen, G., & Salas, E. (2017). One hundred years of
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scientific trends. Journal of Applied Psychology,102(3), 237 –
253.
Lefkowitz, J. (2008). To prosper, organizational psychology
should…expand the values of organizational psychology to
match the quality of its ethics. Journal of Organizational
Behavior,29(4), 439–453.
Melé, D. (2012). The firm as a “community of persons”: A pillar of
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Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today’s divided
society endangers our future. New York, USA: WW Norton &
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ORCID
P. Matthijs Bal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6955-2837
Dr. P. Matthijs Bal, PhD
Lincoln International Business School
University of Lincoln
Lincoln LN6 7TS
United Kingdom
mbal@lincoln.ac.uk
https://doi.org/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333
Recognizing People at Work in Their Full
Humanity –A Commentary on Bal (2020)
Ulrich Leicht-Deobald
Institute for Business Ethics, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
To my delight, I read the essay, “Why we should stop
measuring performance and well-being”by Matthijs Bal
(2020). This work cautions us to consider carefully the
outcomes we study in work and organizational psychology
(WOP). It offers a stunning critique of the one-sided—and
sometimes mindless—application of performance and/or
well-being measures in our research. In short, Bal (2020)
argues that we should refrain from using a narrow
conceptualization of performance and well-being and
instead widen our perspectives to include broader notions
of what is important as organizational outcomes both in
our lives and in society as a whole. For Bal (2020), such an
alternative viewpoint is exemplified in the concept of
dignity that he offers as an alternative guiding principle
(Bal, 2017). This essay provides a timely and fresh
message for professionals in this field.
Bal (2020) states that empirical studies in WOP hardly
ever question the normative assumptions underlying the
concepts of performance and well-being. As such, the
author suggests that performance per se does not have
intrinsic value. Accordingly, performance is normally
measured in WOP as an external sense of what elements
are instrumental to achieve a task. For example, Bal
(2020) discusses a bank employee investing his clients’
money in tax havens. Upon executing this task, the
employee might receive favorable performance evalua-
tions, even though this action might be damaging to
society as a whole. Similarly, the author suggests that
studies of well-being tend to neglect structural aspects of
power and exploitation.
Bal’s (2020) article inspired me to ponder about
whether our struggle to include normative aspects within
our theorizing is partly due to this functional/positivist
epistemology in WOP. This functional/positivist para-
digm has been the dominant logic in WOP regarding what
constitutes legitimate knowledge. An important charac-
teristic of this functional/positivist paradigm is that theory
can be formulated in mathematical terms; explanations
take the form of causal statements or models incorporat-
ing variables (Poole, Van de Ven, Dooley, and Holmes,
200 Dialog
Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie (2020), 64 (3), 196–215 © 2020 Hogrefe Verlag
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/pdf/10.1026/0932-4089/a000333 - P. Matthijs Bal <mbal@lincoln.ac.uk> - Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:52:57 AM - IP Address:145.15.244.31
