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Performance management (PMgmt) is a relatively nascent field that is still evolving to provide managers with tools, intelligence, and perspectives needed to meet challenges arising from rising competition and accelerating change. Most of the work in this field has been reactive and (over the last decade) subject to rapid obsolescence. This thesis seeks to provide PMgmt academics and professionals with the encouragement and means to shift to a more proactive and, thus, enduring stance. Long-term trends in the development and use of PMgmt systems are investigated by using relevant literature as proxies of experience. The rationale is that tracing and analysing patterns, shifts and trends in how PMgmt concepts and practices endlessly adapt to meet the evolving needs of organizations will provide important insight as to how they develop and change over time. The research operational flow is as follows: 1) The literature review gathered common perspectives on how PMgmt changed from the 1980s until now, 2) Qualitative content analysis, incorporating grounded theory, was used to identify patterns in the changes to PMgmt systems from 1998 to 2007, to reveal desired attributes of PMgmt systems which have evolved to fit current managerial needs, 3) Speculative thought was used to highlight the emerging phenomenon of functional overlap of PMgmt systems as a consequence of the forces of convergent evolution (an influence/force revealed via the content analysis). 4) A framework for creating utilities from the functional overlap is proposed. A number of key findings are deduced from this thesis: 1) Management needs, derived from a highly …