SEGISMUNDO, ISABELLE

CHAPTER SIX I EVALUATING EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

JOB PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMANCE APPRAISALS

- Evaluations of job performance is a vital personnel function and very important to organization
- Measure of job performance is also the criterion used in employee screening and selection
- Do predictors of job performance predict success in job?
- Determines effectiveness of employee training programs
- Evaluating the effectiveness of other organizational programs or changes
- Performance Appraisal: the formalized means of assessing work performance in comparison to certain
established organizational standards
o Linked to: career advancement
 Foundation to pay increases and promotions
 Provide feedback to help improve performance and recognize weaknesses
 Offer information about the attainment of work goals
 Used to make decisions such as promotions, demotions, pay raises and to give constructive
feedback
o Facilitate organizational communications by helping interaction between workers and supervisors
o Means of assessing the productivity of individuals and work units

Measurement of Job Performance

- Performance Criteria: means of determining successful or unsuccessful performance

o Products of detailed job analysis
- Objective VS Subjective Performance Criteria
o Objective Performance Criteria: measures of job performance that are easily quantified
 Adv:
 Less prone to bias and distortion than subjective performance criteria
 More directly ties to “bottom-line” assessments of organization’s success
 Dis:
 Some jobs are often to get an objective performance criteria
 May focus too much on specific, quantifiable outcomes
 Time consuming and costly
o Subjective Performance Criteria: measures of job performance that typically consist of ratings or
judgments of performance
 Often used when objective criteria are unavailable, difficult to assess or inappropriate
 Adv:
 Easy and inexpensive to obtain
 Can be used to assess variables that could not be measured objectively
o Issues:
 Criterion relevance- the extent to which the means of appraising performance is pertinent to
success
 Criterion Contamination-the extent to which performance appraisal contains elements that
detract from the accurate assessment of job effectiveness
 Appraiser Bias
 Can result from extraneous factors
 Criterion Deficiency-the degree to which a criterion falls short of measuring job performance
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 Criterion Usefulness-the extent to which a performance criterion is usable in appraising a
particular job
o Sources of Performance Ratings
 Different perspectives can lead to higher reliability, fairness and acceptance
 Supervisor Appraisal
 Mostly done by supervisors
 Knowledgeable about the job requirements and can provide rewards for good
performance
 Higher reliability
 High test-retest reliability
 May have limited perspective
 Self-Appraisals
 Tend to be more lenient and focus more on effort rather than performance
 Large discrepancies between how supervisors and the self rates
 Reduced by training them to understand how the rating system works, receiving
regular performance feedback
 Adv: may lead to open dialogue between supervisor and employees
 Encourages workers to be more committed to performance related goals
 Peer Appraisals
 Good agreement between ratings made by peers and by supervisors
 Problem: Potential to create conflict
 Subordinate Appraisals
 Assess the effectiveness of persons in supervisory or leadership positions
 Good agreement with supervisor ratings
 Provide a different, meaningful perspective on a supervisor’s performance
 Customer Appraisal
 Ratings made by customers
 Most appropriate when the employee and customer have a significant, ongoing
relationship
 360-Degree Feedback
 A method of gathering performance appraisals from a worker’s supervisors,
subordinates, peers, customers and other relevant parties
 Adv:
 Improved reliability of measurement (multiple evaluations)
 Inclusion of more diverse perspectives on the employee’s performance
 Involvement of more organizational members in evaluation and feedback
process
 Improved organizational communication
 Dis:
 Costly
 Used as a management development tool
o Methods of Rating Performance
 Comparative Methods-involving comparisons of one worker’s performance against others
 Rankings
 involving the ranking of supervisees from best to worst
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 Dis: No absolute standards
 Simple to use and applicable to more jobs
 Paired Comparisons
 The rater compared each worker with each other worker in the group
 Hard to do when numbers are large
 Final rank: number of times they were chosen as better
 Dis: No absolute standards
 Adv: Simple to use and applicable to more jobs
 Application: which applicant to eliminate
 Forced Distributions
 Rater assigns workers to established categories ranging from poor to
outstanding on the basis of comparison with all other workers in a group
 Dis: abundance of very good or very bad workers (artificially raising/lowering
evaluations)
 Individual Methods: evaluate an employee by himself/herself without explicit reference to
other workers
 Graphic Rating Scales
 Uses a predetermined scale to rate the worker on important job dimensions
 Dimensions are derived from job analysis
 Take time to develop but can be used to a variety of jobs
 Dimensions are critical
 Dis:
 Prone to certain biased response patterns
 May constrain the appraiser(may not produce the whole image)
 Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales
 Using scales with labels reflecting poor, average and good behavioral incidents
 Focuses on expectations that a worker would be able to perform specific
behavior
 Lengthy and tedious to develop
 Focuses clearly on performance behaviors relevant to a particular job
 Behavioral Observation Scales
 Require appraisers to recall how often a worker has been observed performing
key work behaviors
 Focus on critical behaviors that were actually performed
 Checklists
 Using a series of statements about job performance
 Statements are derived from job analysis (can be positive or negative)
 Forced-choice scale
 Easy to use and provide detailed appraisals
 Dis:
 Expensive and time consuming to develop
 Requires the generation of applicable work related statements
 Assignment of accurate performance values
 Limit the focus of a performance appraisal
 Narratives
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 Open-ended written accounts of a worker’s performance
 Adv: freedom to describe performance in their own words and to emphasize
elements they think are important
 Dis:
 Offers no quantification of performance (difficult to compare)
 May have a different idea on what doing a fair job means
o Problems and Pitfalls
 Errors
 Leniency Errors-tendency to give all workers very positive performance appraisals
 Severity Errors-tendency to give all workers very negative performance appraisals
 Central Tendency Errors-tendency to give all workers the midpoint rating in
performance appraisals
 Leads to a short-circuiting of the appraisal process
 Effects
 Halo Effects-an overall positive evaluation of a worker based on one known positive
characteristic or action
 Horns Effects-an overall negative evaluation of a worker based on one known negative
characteristic or action
 Recency Effects-tendency to give greater weight to recent performance and lesser
weight to earlier performance
 Greater delay->less accurate
 Causal Attribution Error-process by which people assign cause events or behaviors
 Tendency for appraisers to give more extreme appraisals if they believe the cause is
rooted in effort rather than ability
 Actor behavior bias
 Tendency for observers to overattribute causes to characteristics of the actor
and the tendency for the actor to overattribute causes to situational
characteristics
 Leads to inaccurate perceptions of work performance
 Personal Biases-can distort the accuracy of assessments
 Examples: sex, race, age, physical characteristics, pregnancy, relationships
 Certain types of individuals are more prone to bias
 How to deal: make them more aware
 Cross-cultural and International Issues
 It is important that cultural norms and expectation be considered in the development
and delivery
o Performance Appraisal Process
 Looks at:
 How information about the worker’s performance is acquired
 How the evaluator organizes and stores information about a worker’s performance
 How the evaluator retrieves and translates the stored information in making the actual
performance appraisal
 Evaluators form opinions as they observe behavior day to day
 Evaluators should be presented with the performance appraisal rating instruments up front
 Helpful to have evaluators keep diaries or daily records
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 Two parts:
 Performance assessment-means of measuring a worker’s performance to make
personnel decisions
 Performance feedback-the process of giving information to a worker about performance
level with suggestions for future improvement
 Typically occurs in an interview
 Constructive feedback is important but “informal” feedback is also needed
 Likely to have psychological and emotional effects on the worker
o Legal Concerns
 Scrutinized in terms of fair employment legislation
 Have to be valid (based on job analysis and must be validated against the job duties performed)
 Needs to be administered and scored under controlled and standardized conditions
o Team Appraisals
 Should be appraised as a rather than individual appraisals
 Model: assess team member’s competencies, their team behaviors and total team performance
 May require team members to evaluate each other and the team as a whole