Performance Models

Introduction

After presenting individual and organizational performance as measured with the adaptive profiles, this article explores how they provide insights into other performance models and how those models complement one another. It introduces how the measures provide a new basis for understanding how people and their organization function at their best. When assessed with nuance, the measures become relevant across a variety of topics related to a company’s strategy and operations, including for attracting, recruiting, and empowering the people it needs.

Individual Performance

As the conceptualization of organizational performance and management control systems has dramatically progressed over the past decades, so has the understanding of people and their management. Although it is taking longer than in technology, research in the social sciences has built, broken, challenged, and tested the limitations of many models and tools over the years. The factor-based approach and its adaptive profiles emerged as a distinct category from the more popular trait and type measurements at the end of the 1940s. It was gradually deployed in small and large organizations first in the US, then in Canada and Europe in the 1970s, often unnoticed compared to approaches of the two other more popular categories.

Adaptive profiles measure people's social behavior: their natural flow—how they perform at their best—their effective behavior, intrinsic motivation, adaptation efforts, and engagement in context.

How does personal performance happen, and what does it produce? The adaptive profiles can tell. Like in the entertainment industry, actors perform in various ways on stage, taking on different roles, influenced not only by their personal experience and characteristics but also by how they are required to act. The same happens in sports, where athletes are expected to collaborate and adapt when playing together. In companies, different roles require employees to act and adapt in different ways.

Adaptive profiles are calculated using a two-question, open-scenario, adjective format. The results are profiles that subtly show how people behave, feel, and think. They provide insights into optimal performance in flow, adaptation, and engagement, and identify conditions to prevent underperformance..

Today, markets are familiar with approaches that measure traits and types. Based on factors, adaptive profiles differ widely by removing important limitations in how measures are represented, learned, and used, providing greater nuances across many applications in recruitment, management, leadership, and organizational development..

Organizational Performance

Adaptive profiles are used at the position, team, and company levels to determine the behaviors expected at those levels. Unlike working with concepts that can only be inferred and never seen, working with behavior at an organizational level is practical and effective. Behaviors are observable, can be described, analyzed, and discussed. As evidenced by performance models based on values, working on social behavior applies universally to a variety of situations, stakeholders, industries, and cultures.

Effective (Strategic) Performance

Effective or strategic performance can be established to determine how results will be achieved and what actions should be taken.

As with other characteristics of experience and skills, some behaviors are expected to be acted out in positions. The adaptive profiles enable defining them and comparing them with those of the individuals who sit in them.

Does performance occur at the group level as intended, with appropriate fit among people and with enough diversity? The answer comes by comparing the adaptive profiles of individuals, positions, teams, and organizations. Once a company's management has defined the behaviors expected in positions and teams, aggregating profiles and calculating strategic indicators based on them formalizes the intent and helps manage performance over time.

Discussing these behaviors at the team and organizational levels increases the likelihood of reaching consensus. If behaviors must be expressed differently across jobs and teams at varying levels of intensity and frequency, recruitment and management must ensure this.

In our sports example, different behaviors are expected of athletes during competition. When training and socializing, athletes are expected to exhibit other social behaviors. How does their adapted flow and effective profile match what’s expected of them during training and while competing? The adaptive profiles provide the answer.

Well-being (Social) Performance

An organization's well-being or social performance can be measured by aggregating the engagement levels from the adaptive profiles.

An organization and team’s results rely not only on each individual's participation but also on their ability to engage their collective efforts. Leaders and managers, as in sports with coaches and captains, play a vital role in building group cohesion, increasing individual involvement, and maintaining high engagement levels. But how do these performances on the field actually occur, and what results do they generate? The adaptive profiles can tell.

In sports, the trust and cohesion built during training are crucial to success. The disengagement of one teammate can impact the rest of the team. During competition, coaches and captains give real-time calls and directions. Some team members may also assume leadership roles. The team’s success relies on social performance and support from leadership, the organization, and the broader community, including educators, families, sponsors, advocates, and supporters.

Social Behavior Across Performance Models

Organizational performance can be approached through various models, which address aspects of its conceptualization on one hand and its measurement and control on the other hand.

Performance Conceptualization

Regarding its conceptualization, several approaches have been proposed to categorize performance by context: research, society, leadership, organizational development, and more. For example, the models can be grouped into three categories according to their origins in economics, organizational studies, and social research. Others have suggested categorizing them into three categories: objectives, systems, and stakeholders which is the one we adopted here. The value model was analyzed separately from the stakeholders model because it provides a distinct, overall understanding of how individuals and organizations behave. The non-performance model was added because it stands apart and continues to be a powerful model for understanding and managing performance. This grouping allows highlighting different analytical focus points, limitations, and relationships with management control systems.

By comparing management intent with individuals’ adaptive profiles (measuring which social behaviors are present vs. absent), organizations can move beyond intuition and ensure their strategic focus—whether systemic, cybernetic, holistic, or values-based—is informed by an effective understanding of how people and their organizations perform.

Models	Focus	Adaptive Profiles Insights
Objectives	Objectives are set and managed at different levels of the organization. Techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, management by objectives, individual criteria, or behavioral goals are used.	The adaptive profile provides the individual criteria for assessing how the person will set, communicate, and meet their goals.
Systems	Systemic models emphasize the importance of an organization's means, such as inputs, outputs, resource acquisition, and processes. They include the operations research model, the structural contingency model, and the culturalist and social regulation models.	The adaptive profile provides a critical input metric—the human factor—that affects processes (e.g., collaboration) and outputs (e.g., results).
Stakeholders	Stakeholders' performance models emphasize the expectations of individuals and interest groups that are either within or surrounding the organization. It includes the organizational development model, satisfaction, and expectancy models.	The adaptive profile provides an understanding of the individual and group values and behaviors that drive stakeholders' satisfaction and expectations.
Values	Value models extend the stakeholder model to understand organizations in terms of individual values and preferences. The concept of values encompasses broad aspects of social behavior that, unlike others, can be described, measured, and shared.	The adaptive profile provides a framework for describing, measuring, and sharing values across the organization.
Non-performance	It is easier, more precise, consensual, and beneficial to address performance issues by problems and faults rather than by skills and performance criteria.	The adaptive profile helps identify conditions that can prevent underperformance (e.g., high adaptation effort and disengagement) and provides precise language (observable behavior) for problem resolution.

Performance Measurement and Control

Until the 1980s, management control research had focused on performance measures within the cybernetic model, an extension of the more popular command-and-control model that had dominated until the 1950s. Considering new individual and cultural factors alongside non-financial measures has enabled the holistic model to gradually overcome some limitations of the cybernetic model. Since the 2000s, thanks to capabilities from software platforms, the Internet, and later AI, Management Control System (MCS) packages have integrated and powered management control systems as integral parts of organizational management, most often aligned with holistic models. The three grand models are summarized in this table and detailed in separate articles.

Models	Focus
Command and Control	Traditional hierarchical top-down approach, with original management control systems for planning and controlling.
Cybernetic	Accounts for the first-order loop feedback, learning, and communication in addition to financial and production metrics.
Holisitc	Extends the cybernetic model with a second-order feedback loop and emphasizes the relationships and interactions among the organization’s different parts, including its culture, vision, mission, and reward systems.

Organizational performance models have evolved over time, not to replace earlier ones but to improve them, expand their scope, and develop new models that meet current needs. Since the 2000s, with the rise of the Internet and more recently, AI, our ability to collect and analyze people's data has greatly increased. Similarly, management control systems have advanced, enhancing our capacity to better understand and manage people. How organizations can improve their performance over time is closely connected to how individuals and teams can enhance their performance.