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1. Introduction
The National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) is one of the government organizations that report directly to the president of Iran, is as old as more than one century. In many countries, the national library and national archives operate independently, but in some countries such as Canada and Iran, these two institutions have been merged. In August 2002, the national library was merged with the national archives. The top-level organizational chart is as Figure 1.
The central office of NLAI is located in Tehran, and totally 1,100 employees spread across Iran in Tehran and 13 others regional centers that perform national duties and missions in the area under their cover.
Approximately 10 years ago, the first attempt to implement an employee performance appraisal system in the NLAI began. First, an in-house system was developed that was put aside after a while due to the protests that had been done to pay off based on the performance. Once again, with the use of external consultants, the employee performance appraisal system was launched, which was abandoned due to managerial changes.
For these reasons, at the beginning of implementation of employee performance appraisal system, in Jan 2018, there was no positive attitude about it and in the pilot phase was faced with employees' dissatisfaction. Then it was decided to review all aspects of the project by using soft operational research (OR) approaches because of all stakeholders should be considered as possible. This research is in fact an answer to the question of how to improve the maturity of the employee performance appraisal system in a way that simultaneously increases the NLAI productivity and reducing the dissatisfaction of all stakeholders.
2. Literature review
2.1 Employee performance appraisal and management
To better understand the concept of employee performance management, we first discuss “performance” and its importance. Bates and Holton (1995) pointed out that “Performance is a multidimensional construct, the measurement of which varies depending on a variety of factors. They also stated that it is important to determine whether the measurement objective is to assess performance outcomes, behavior, or both. Performance as a behavior is about what employees do, and not about what employees produce or the outcomes of their work; but performance outcomes are job-related factors....