IMIB Journal of Innovation and Management

Poor Performance Management or Management Trick

Geeta Rana¹ and Ravindra Sharma¹

First Published 21 May 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/ijim.251335501

Article Information

Corresponding Author:

Geeta Rana, Himalayan School of Management Studies, Swami Rama Himalayan University, Jolly Grant, Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248016, India.
Email: geetarana@srhu.edu.in

¹Himalayan School of Management Studies, Swami Rama Himalayan University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-Commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed.

Abstract

This article follows events faced by Nisha Verma, a talented employee at Lotus Beauty Care Pvt Ltd, Haridwar. While Nisha’s consistently good performance was acknowledged by even her superiors, she was shocked to receive a poor performance appraisal in 2018. While she tried to talk to her superiors to know the reason for such a poor appraisal, she got no clear answer. This case study examines the event and seeks to determine whether: (a) Nisha really received the appraisal she deserved?, (b) it was a case of poor employee performance management on the part of Lotus? or (c) it was a deliberate ploy by Lotus to oust Nisha so that they could hire someone else for a lower salary?

This article aims to:

Analyse the performance appraisal method used to assess the performance of Nisha Verma.
Examine the basis on which Nisha Verma was given a poor performance appraisal.
Analyse Nisha’s performance appraisal and the events that followed
Debate whether the issue was just a case of wrongly (or otherwise) performed performance appraisal, or a deliberate attempt by Lotus to oust Nisha in order to hire someone else at a lower salary.

Keywords

Performance management, talent retention, attrition, grading, key performance indicators

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