It is appropriate that we begin our journey by considering those ideas, concepts, propositions and debates that are fundamental to a rounded understanding of employee performance and reward management and, equally, to well-informed and effective practice in these fields.

The four chapters in part 1 are devoted to this end. Chapter 1 seeks to clarify the meaning, nature and purpose of our two focal human resource processes: performance management and reward management. While our treatment of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of performance and reward management is written from an explicitly prescriptive–descriptive perspective, the treatment is neither wholly management-centred nor uncritical.

Building on this foundational knowledge, the three accompanying chapters consider, respectively, the psychological, motivational and strategic basics of performance and reward management. These chapters offer frameworks for practising performance and reward management in both a psychologically aware and a strategically informed manner. The development, implementation and maintenance of effective performance and reward management systems requires simultaneous attention to each of these fundamental dimensions.

By ‘psychological’ dimensions we mean the attitudes, perceptions, values and emotional (or ‘affective’) states that prefigure the observable actions – or behaviour – of individual employees, or at least that seem to predispose individuals towards certain behavioural actions rather than others. While ‘motivation’ is undoubtedly the most widely acknowledged and theorised of all work attitudes, as we shall see, there are others that may be no less salient or influential, including those that are grounded more in perception and in deeply held values and emotions than in dispassionate or rational cognition.