 Employees are often frustrated about the appraisal process  Appraisals are too subjective  Possibility of unfair treatment by a supervisor  Way to improve performance appraisals:  Recognize that part of performance is influenced more by the work environment and system than by employee behaviors  Identify strategies for understanding and measuring job performance better

 Improve appraisal formats  Select the right raters  Understand how raters process information  Training raters to rate more accurately

 Evaluation formats can be divided into: two general categories  Ranking ▪ The rater compare employees against each other ▪ Straight ranking, Alternation ranking, and paired- comparison ranking  Rating ▪ Requires evaluating employees on some absolute standard rather than relative to other employees ▪ Standard rating scale; Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS); management by objectives (MBO)

 In both the standard rating scale and BARS, overall performance is calculated as some weighted average of the ratings on all dimensions.  An alternative method for obtaining the overall rating would be to allow rater discretion in rating performance on the individual dimensions and also assigning the overall evaluation.

Source: Mark L. McConkie, “A Clarification of the Goal Setting and Appraisal Process in MBO,” Academy of Management Review 4(1) (1979), pp. 29–40. © 1979, Academy of Management Review.

 What makes for a good appraisal format?  Employee development potential ▪ Critical feedback focused on the task, not on the individual  Administrative ease ▪ For the use concerning wage increases, promotions, demotions, terminations, and transfers ▪ Need for numerical ratings  Personnel research potential ▪ Relationship with employment tests?  Cost ▪ Initial costs, time requirement for use  Validity ▪ Reducing errors and improving accuracy

 360-degree feedback  Assesses employee performance from five points of view: supervisor, peer, self, customer, subordinate  Is flexible  Improves employee understanding and self- awareness  Promotes communication between supervisors and staff  Promotes better performance and results

 Criterion deficiency  Using objective measures that don’t truly represent all of the key dimensions of the job  Criterion contamination  Allowing non-performance factors to affect performance scores

 Rater-error training  Goal is to reduce psychometric errors by familiarizing raters with their existence  Performance-dimension training  Exposes supervisors to the performance dimensions to be used in rating  Performance-standard training  Provides raters with a standard or frame of reference for making appraisals

 General increase  Cost-of-living adjustments  Progression pattern based on seniority  Merit guidelines  Promotional increases