Why Companies Fail With Objectives And Key Results: An Analysis Of Implementation Frameworks

Abstract

OKR is an approach that focuses on the company's goals through trust-based agreements between leaders and employees. With the OKR framework in its original form, strategic business goals are aligned with the employees' active involvement, which promotes intrinsic motivation, transparency, commitment, and alignment. Inspired by the successes at Google and Intel and shaped by its use in the tech industry, the use of Objectives and Key Results (OKR) increased across industries. Although companies within all sectors use the OKR framework, numerous implementation efforts fail. The challenges of practice are not fully addressed in the development of implementation concepts for OKR. One main reason is that these challenges are not addressed in scientific publications. The paper aims to investigate to what extent existing OKR frameworks need to be adapted to provide companies with implementation guidance. Firstly, OKR is terminologically placed in the context of academically widely discussed Performance Management Systems (PMS). Secondly, criteria for successful PMS implementation are identified and used as a baseline for analysing existing OKR implementation concepts. A systematic literature review shows the current state of research, identifying existing OKR implementation concepts from practice and theory. The OKR implementation concepts identified are systematically mapped to the series of identified criteria for PMS implementation. The result of the paper is that the existing OKR frameworks do not meet the necessary criteria for a successful implementation of PMS, thus the adaptation of existing OKR implementation concepts is required.