Read the following case study and ALL answer the questions that follow.

Performance Management at Gypsy Tigers

Gypsy Tigers is a medium$-$sized manufacturing company, located near Goshoura, India. The company manufactures consumer products for numerous well$-$known, global brands. The company grew out of a small family business and has been slow to modernise and adopt formal HR systems. The owners believe that good human relations are critical, and thus their emphasis has been on treating all their employees like family members, with little emphasis paid to establishing formal systems. However, the global brands that Gypsy Tigers serves have been doing very well, thus putting pressure on the company to modernise their systems.

At the clients' insistence, the owners recently brought in a consultant, Miss Rita Kohli, to help with to establish a performance management system. Miss Kohli is a graduate of the top business school in India and has worked with several multi$-$national corporations $($MNCs$)-$ her speciality being performance management systems. Among the first tasks she was assigned by the CEO, Mr Ajay Srivastava, was to establish a performance management system whereby formal appraisals are conducted once a year. However, Mr Srivastava also let Miss Kohli know that the company would like to keep the results of the evaluations confidential. In other words, the plant managers and other supervisors would evaluate each of their direct reports once a year, and the completed appraisal forms would be placed in the employee's personnel file, but not discussed or shared with the individual employee. When Miss Kohli enquired why the appraisals were to be kept confidential, Mr Srivastava told her that they had always treated their employees as family members and sharing 'report cards' with them would create tension among the workforce and lead to unhealthy competition between employees, instead of the cooperation that the employees have been demonstrating all these years.

Miss Kohli was somewhat taken aback, though not surprised, at the owners' thought process. She was well aware that many companies in India $($and elsewhere in Asia and Latin America$)$ follow the paternalistic model, whereby employees are treated like family members, and are protected by the company. At the same time the professors in her business school had continuously reinforced the importance of transparency and providing feedback to individuals. Indeed, in her work with other companies, she had found that global companies often had open systems, whereby each manager $/$ supervisor discussed his $/$ her subordinates evaluation with them and explained each rating.

Indeed, when Miss Kohi had first arrived at Gypsy Tigers, she had spoken with several employees and asked how they felt about not being evaluated formally, and almost all of them said that they would like to know how they were doing, so they could improve where necessary. Many employees also noted that almost all their colleagues got the same $($or very similar$)$ raises, even though they knew that many of their colleagues did not work as hard.

When Miss Kohli approached Mr Srivastava with the feedback she had gathered from the employees, he seemed unhappy and asked her to simply concentrate on the task she was given, instead of "starting trouble".

$($Source: Crawshaw, J$.,$ Budhwar, P$.$ and Davis, A$.(2023)$ Human Resource Management: Strategic and International Perspectives. London: Sage.$)$

Question $4$

$(25$ Marks$)$

Critically discuss the role of leadership and management in ensuring that Gypsy Tiger's new performance management system is effective.