Recognizing Components of Sustainable Performance Management: An Illustration of Bibliometric Networks Based on Meta-Synthesis Approach

Managers strive for comprehensive, reliable, and flexible solutions to evaluate their organization's performance. Nonetheless, recognizing practical performance components has always remained relatively unanswered among managers and researchers. Accordingly, the present study aims to identify the elements influencing sustainable performance management processes considering research literature in the contingent field and eventually pinpointing potentially relevant elements. These elements would assist managers, specifically human resource managers, pursue their objectives. Researchers have already identified keywords related to the research topic by employing meta-word analysis and brainstorming methods with the help of Qiqqa software. Afterward, using VOSviewer, they extracted the vocabulary items of the co-occurrence network. This network and the hotspots identified hereafter established a solid foundation for meta-synthesis, taken as a meta-synthesis approach in this study. Then, four contingent keywords, including “sustainable development”, “sustainable development management”, “sustainable performance development”, and “sustainable performance management,” were considered to explore and analyze scholarly global databases such as Emerald, Proquest, SID, and Web of Science, as well as Google Scholar database and the dissertations defended by postgraduate students. Sources initially entering this research included 312 studies in full text, of which 80 were excluded due to lack of inclusion criteria. Eventually, the contents of the remaining 232 articles were surveyed. The number of overarching themes stands at one constructive theme, four primary themes, and seven, and the frequency of extracted codes hit 513. The findings of this research demonstrated that the components of innovation, technology, supply chain, organizational knowledge, economic, social, and environmental factors could cover all aspects of performance evaluation and would introduce a new literature called “Sustainable Performance Management” into the management field. The components of innovation, technology, supply chain, and organizational knowledge fail to be identified except through meta-synthesis and library analysis. This unprecedented aspect of the present study makes it distinguishable from previous studies. Considering this article's findings, managers, researchers, and other related professionals will be able to conceptualize and comprehend performance management issues in an alternative way. Consequently, human resource managers could identify components related to the sustainability of organizational performance management and put them into research and practice.