Does the PER System Contribute to Institutional Performance? Assessing Employees’ Awareness and Effectiveness in a Public Sector University

The Performance Management System (PMS) serves as a critical and complex mechanism for assessing employees’ performance in the higher education sector. This research endeavor has mainly focused on the investigation of the performance evaluation system in one of the public sector universities in Kyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan about its understanding, effectiveness and empowerment of the employees within the system called Performance Evaluation Report (PER). Sampling respondents include lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors and professors. The key findings of the research depict that most of the employees have good understanding of the PER in terms of its content and its clear linkage to their job targets and goals. However, majority of the participants have corroborated the substantial disagreement towards its effectiveness in some key components that include reward system, lack of counselling and support for the employees if they perform below the set standards and the issue of transparency in the current system. In addition, the issue of favoritism is mentioned by some of the staff which makes the current system more bias. Based on the results of the study it is recommended that either improve the current PER system with some modifications such as the feedback of all the stakeholders are taken about an employee rather than one person’s decision such as the line manager.