LEAD 6163 Module 4 Performance Management and Retention Plan Example

Feedback That Develops and Ties That Hold: A Performance Management and Retention Plan for Nursing Faculty, Built on Job Embeddedness

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6163: Management of Human Capital

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 2, 2026

Introduction

Three earlier papers in this course found that my department loses about 11% of its full-time faculty each year to causes other than retirement, and that exit interviews cite pay, weak connections to colleagues and a difficult first year. Recruitment and development plans will bring in and prepare new faculty; this paper addresses whether they stay. It redesigns the department's performance management, which faculty describe as a once-a-year form with little meaning, and builds a retention plan around research on why people remain in their jobs.

The Current Evaluation Process

Each spring, faculty complete a self-evaluation form, the chair rates them on teaching, scholarship and service using a five-point scale and the two meet for about 20 minutes. Ratings cluster at 4 and 5, few faculty can recall a specific suggestion from their last evaluation and the process is not linked to development plans or to the mentoring program. Faculty who left in the last three years rarely mentioned the evaluation in exit interviews, but several said they had not known how their work was valued until they were offered a job elsewhere. Adjunct faculty receive no evaluation at all beyond student course surveys, even though they supervise most clinical hours, so the new cycle will include a short semester review for each adjunct with the course coordinator.

What Research Says About Performance Management

DeNisi and Murphy (2017) looked back over a hundred years of studies on rating employees and concluded that the long effort to perfect rating scales and correct rater bias had bought only modest improvement; they argued that attention needs to shift toward performance management, the broader set of activities through which organizations try to improve performance, including feedback, goal setting and development. Their review suggests that refining the annual rating form is unlikely to change much. What matters more is how often people receive useful feedback and whether that feedback connects to goals and support.

A Developmental Performance Cycle

The new cycle has four parts. In August, each faculty member sets three goals with the chair, one for teaching, one for scholarship or practice and one for service or partnership work, linked where possible to the mentoring program. In each semester, faculty receive one peer observation of teaching with a debriefing, which also supports new faculty through the transition described in Module 3. In January, a 30-minute check-in reviews progress and adjusts goals. In May, the annual review becomes a conversation about the year's goals and the next year's development, with the rating form reduced to a summary required by the university. The point of the change is that no faculty member should first learn how their work is valued from another employer's job offer.

When Performance Falls Short

A developmental cycle must still handle real performance problems. When a faculty member's teaching observations, student evaluations or clinical supervision raise concerns, the January check-in becomes the point of action. The chair and faculty member agree on two or three specific changes, a support, such as observing a colleague's class or attending a test-writing workshop, and a date to review progress, usually within the semester. Concerns that persist after support move into the university's formal improvement process, with documentation. The department has avoided these conversations in the past, partly because it could not afford to lose anyone; but tolerating weak teaching harms students and burdens colleagues who compensate for it, which is itself a cause of turnover among the department's strongest faculty.

Why People Stay

Retention research has long focused on why people leave. Mitchell et al. (2001) asked the opposite question and proposed job embeddedness, the forces that keep people in their jobs: links, the connections people have with colleagues, groups and community; fit, how well the job and community match their values and plans; and sacrifice, what they would give up by leaving. Across their samples, knowing how embedded people were told the researchers something about who would quit that satisfaction and commitment scores alone did not. Hom et al. (2017) placed embeddedness within a century of turnover research that moved from satisfaction and alternatives toward these broader forces. For a rural department competing with higher-paying hospitals, embeddedness offers levers beyond salary, which the department cannot fully control.

Retention Plan: Links

Faculty who left described weak connections to colleagues and the community. The plan strengthens links in three ways: the mentoring program pairs every new faculty member with a senior colleague; each faculty member joins a course team that meets monthly; and the department will connect new faculty who relocate with community organizations, from churches to hospital volunteer boards, through a faculty member who knows the area. Links to clinical partners, built through the partnership handovers in Module 3, also embed faculty in the region's nursing community. Small gestures count as well: the department will hold a welcome dinner for each new faculty member's family and ask a colleague to invite them to a community event in their first month.

Retention Plan: Fit and Sacrifice

Fit improves when the job matches what faculty value. Nurse practitioner faculty, for example, want to keep practicing; the plan protects one clinical practice day a week for them. Faculty interested in scholarship will receive the doctoral support described earlier. Sacrifice, what faculty would give up by leaving, can be increased in ways that also serve them: a summer teaching stipend, priority for course releases after three years of service and the university's tuition benefit for family members, which the department will publicize better. Salary remains the hardest problem. The department will request a market adjustment for nursing faculty, documenting the roughly $18,000 gap with regional hospital pay, while accepting that salary alone is unlikely to be closed in the short term.

Risks

Two risks deserve attention. More frequent observation and check-ins take time, and faculty already stretched by vacancies may see them as another burden; the plan limits each element to a fixed, short format and counts peer observation as service. The second risk is that retention efforts become uneven, with the chair investing in favored faculty; the embeddedness survey, reported by faculty group rather than individually, will show whether links and support reach everyone.

Measures

The plan will be judged on voluntary turnover among full-time faculty, targeted to fall from 11% to 7% within three years; the share of new hires still on the faculty three years later; a short annual embeddedness survey adapted from the links, fit and sacrifice dimensions; and the share of faculty who report receiving useful feedback at least twice a year. Exit interviews will continue, and their reasons will be compared with the embeddedness results to see whether the plan addressed the right forces.

Conclusion

Performance management and retention meet in a simple question: does the department show its faculty, regularly and specifically, that their work is valued and that their future is here? The plan answers with a developmental feedback cycle and with deliberate work on the links, fit and sacrifice that keep people in place. Module 5 will combine recruitment, development and retention into a single human capital plan.

References

DeNisi, A. S., & Murphy, K. R. (2017). Performance appraisal and performance management: 100 years of progress? Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 421-433. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000085

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102-1121. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069391