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xviii Series Preface
interventions upon the stakeholders involved. These latter include employees, customers,
shareholders, suppliers, and the wider community (2).
The success criterion for these handbooks, then, is a simple one: Will professionals
find them useful in their practice? If they also help in the development of apprentice
professionals-for example, by being used on training courses-then so much the better.
The field of Work and Organisational Psychology is currently at risk from a failure to
integrate theory and practice (3). Theory and research often seem to practitioners to
address issues of interest only to academics; and practice appears to academics to lack
careful empirical, let alone theoretical, underpinning. These handbooks will help to
bridge this divide, and thereby justify the title of ‘Handbook’.
What is clear is that if we psychologists fail to impact upon the urgent issues which
currently crowd in upon organisations, then those who claim to address them better or
faster will gain power and influence. This will happen even if their solutions offer little
longer-termbenefittoclients.TheWileyHandbooksinthePsychologyofManagementin
Organisationsprovidearesourcetohelpprofessionalsservetheirclientsmoreeffectively.
This first handbook first in the series is edited by Sabine Sonnentag, and addresses a
pressing management issue. When commercial competitiveness or government funding
depend upon continuous improvements in efficiency and productivity, how can Work
and Organisational Psychology help manage employees’ performance so as to achieve
them? The international contributors tackle such knotty problems as how to maximise
individuals’ capabilities by designing work in appropriate ways; how best to assess and
review performance; how to utilise training and mentoring to enhance performance;
how to design reward systems which lead to improved performance; how to persuade
everyone in an organisation that performance is a fundamentally important issue; and
how to help employees to better manage their own performance. These are the key
questions in the field; and academics and practitioners have collaborated to provide a
contemporary, stimulating, and above all useful set of answers.

REFERENCES

nd
1. TheRandomHouseDictionaryoftheEnglishLanguage(2 edn.)(1987).NewYork:Random
House.
2. Hodgkinson, G. P., & Herriot, P. (2002) The role of psychologists in enhancing organisational
effectiveness. In I. Robertson, M. Callinan, & D. Bartram (Eds.), The Role of Individual
Performance in Organisational Effectiveness. Chichester: Wiley.
3. Anderson, N., Herriot, P., & Hodgkinson, G. P. (2001) The practitioner–researcher divide in
Industrial, Work, and Organisational (IWO) Psychology: Where are we now, and where do
we go from here? Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology (in press).