Performance management is often considered to be, or certainly such is the case for accountants, a subfield of management accounting. Although it is certainly the case that the major advancements in the field of performance management have been driven by management accountants, it is fairer and more accurate to view performance management as an interdisciplinary field of study involving the disciplines of strategic management, organizational behaviour, organizational theory and management accounting. Performance management, which is broadly about how organizations design their organizational structures, systems, and cultures to encourage employees’ implementation of their respective organizations’ strategies, is informed and enriched by practitioners and scholars working across these four broad disciplines. Contributions to this interdisciplinary field of study have been ongoing for the past 50—plus years.
The description of performance management as an interdisciplinary science should not be confused with the word multidisciplinary. The latter term refers to studying a particular topic from various fields of speciality, while all the time remaining inside one’s speciality. In other words, an organizational behaviourist would study performance management with a purely