In the Organisation

Context

It is that time of year. Everyone knows it is coming. The forms go out, the self-assessments are written, the manager prepares their ratings, and the one-to-ones are scheduled. The organisation may have moved to agile, reorganised around teams, and invested in collaboration, but for these few weeks, the focus shifts unmistakably back to the individual. People remember that their pay, their career, and their standing in the organisation are determined not by how the team performed but by how they personally look to the person above them. The careful positioning begins. The collaborative spirit that seemed genuine a month ago quietly recedes.

OST explains

The annual individual performance review is one of the most structurally destructive rituals in modern organisations because it is so normalised. Whatever DP2-based structure the organisation has managed to build during the year, the performance review reinstates DP1 values in a single stroke: you are an individual, your performance is separable from the group’s, and someone above you is qualified to judge it. In a self-managing group, individual performance reviews are not only unnecessary, they are actively harmful because they reintroduce personal dominance through one of its most intimate mechanisms. Research consistently shows that external individual evaluation undermines exactly the intrinsic motivation that DP2 structures produce. The review is not a neutral administrative process. It is a structural signal about who is really in charge and what actually gets rewarded.