* Corresponding author. Tel: +989125021127 E-mail addresses: dr.me.kh@gmail.com (M. Kheirandish) © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2012.07.024 Management Science Letters 2 (2012) 2435–2440 Contents lists available at GrowingScience Management Science Letters homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl An empirical study on performance management: A case study of national Iranian oil Production Distribution Company Abolhassan Faghihi a , Alireza Afsharnezhad b and Mehdi Kheirandish c* a Department of Management, School of Management and Economics, Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University b Department of Management, Phd Student of Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran. c Department of Accounting & Management of Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Received March 22, 2012 Received in Revised form June, 15, 2012 Accepted 18 July 2012 Available online July 28 2012 The primary goal of creating a culture of performance management is to improve processes based on the responsibility of individuals and groups for the continuous improvement of business processes, and to contribute to their skills. In this paper, we discuss all related issues and indentify the most important aspects and components of performance management. The proposed study of this paper is to find out which performance management works best for national Iranian oil products distribution company (NIOPDC). The proposed study uses analytical hierarchy process to prioritize all important factors based on pair-wise comparison. We use geometric mean to find the average of comparisons and all computations are performed using Expert Choice software package. In summary, stakeholders (0.262) are the most important components of our survey followed by employee management (0.247), social responsibility (0.190) comes in the third position and quality of services (0.166) and internal process (0.134) are two less important factors in this survey. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Performance management AHP Oil industry 1. Introduction During the past few years, there have been tremendous efforts on having efficient methods for measuring and improving quality of organizations. Many of these methods focus on more than just financial figures and they have looked inside the organization by investigating different items such as people, processes, customers, etc. (Hooks & Farry, 2000; Westcott, 2005; Ueltschy et al., 2007). SERVQUAL has been considered as one of the most important one (Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1991). According to SERVQUAL model, customers evaluate quality of service through five aspects including tangibles, reliability, responsibility, assurance, empathy. The BSC breaks through the traditional limitations of finance, examining an organization’s performance from the four main perspectives of finance, customer, internal business process, and