Includes CD

Includes references (199-217 p.)

'ABSTRACT Today, experts and managers of the fast-growing high professional service industry face multi-dimensional changes: mergers, organizational restructuring programmes, strategies, proceses and systems are all faced as part of permanent efforts to stay competitive. A variety of international competitors offer actual solutions and a strong willingness to to enter any market. Additionally, there is the customer: highly demanding of quality standards and innovation as well as highly informed about price-perfomance relations. They are used to a high degree of of knowledge delivery, full loyalty and the emotional contagion of the consultancies. Short term highering and firing are possible. Under those circumstances, the requirement that highly-educated professionals must offer continually high perfomance to customers and their own management has increased to a maximum of pressure, leading thus to dissatisfaction. Employees of this industy - e.g., delivering engineering, IT or processes and strategy consulting services - are more likely to leave their job and change company than accept imperfections in their career path, such as enduring an excessively stressful and ever-changing working environment or a poor relationship with their boss. However developments like these, if not recognized, cause disorientation amoung management and hinder proper decision-making processes. The consequences include irritation concerning the building of efficient organizational frameworks and the need to use an approprietly supportive leadership behavioral style to ensure the best perfomance of employees. Also required is a balanced and holistic perfomance management approach that properly controls an organization and iys employees inorder to achieve the optimal outcome. The purpose of this study is on the one hand to reduce employee flactuation to a minimum by reaching a high level of employee satisfaction. A high level of customer satisfaction is the secondary and related purpose. On the other hand, the organizational side of management requires a new attitude for the future that is related to businessprocess re-engineering activities, the continual pressure of reorganization necessary to be most competitive in organizational settings. Thus, the study discusses the influencing factors on the perfomance of employees in the German proffesional service market. With the help of prevailing theory and qualitative pre-study, the main issues have been identified. Here, personal interviews were held to determine the appropriate fields of research. Based on this, a quantitative study has been undertaken leading to findings for practice and future research: an optimised, combined set of perfomace management activities necessary to obtain an efficient framework for employees and managers in the high professional service industry. Key Words:High Professional Service Industry, Performance Management, Business Process Reengineering, Change Management, Organizational Behaviour, Employee Satisfaction '