Appraisals

• Need for Appraisals


  1. Administrative Decisions
  2. Employee Development and Feedback
  3. Research & Innovation
• Administrative Decisions


  Many administrative decisions that affect employees are based on their job performance in the annual reviews. Most large organizations use job performance as the basis for many negative and positive actions.

  Negative actions - demotion and termination (firing), and some organizations have policies that require the firing of unsatisfactorily performing employees.

  Positive actions - promotion and pay raises, and many organizations have merit pay systems that tie raises to the level of job performance.

  hold both the employee and the employer accountable
• Employee Development and Feedback

  One of the major roles of supervisors is to provide information to their subordinates about what is expected on the job and how well they are meeting those expectations. Employees need to know when they are performing well so that they will continue to do so, as well as when they are not so that they can change what they are doing.
• Employee Development and Feedback


  A new trend is for companies to go beyond the once per year evaluation in designing a comprehensive performance management system. In addition to the annual appraisal, such systems can include goal setting and periodic coaching and feedback sessions between the employee and supervisor.
• Whereas the annual review might be used for administrative purposes, the interim reviews would be used only for feedback,
• Research, Innovation


  The efforts of I/O psychologists can be directed toward designing better equipment, hiring better people, motivating employees, and training employees.
• Research Innovation


  A good design would be an experiment in which one group of employees receives a new procedure, while a control group of employees does not. The two groups could be compared to see if the group that received the new procedure had better job performance than the control group that did not.
• A criterion is a standard against which you can judge the performance of anything, including a person. It allows you to distinguish good from bad performance
• The theoretical criterion is the definition of what good performance is rather than how it is measured. The theoretical criterion is a theoretical construct. It is the idea of what good performance is.
• The actual criterion is the way in which the theoretical criterion is assessed or operationalized. It is the performance appraisal technique that is used, such as counting a salesperson’s sales.
• Our actual criteria are intended to assess the underlying theoretical criteria of interest. In practice, the actual criterion often provides only a rough estimate of the theoretical criterion it is supposed to assess.Three concepts help explain this situation:
• Criterion contamination refers to that part of the actual criterion that reflects something other than what it was designed to measure. Contamination can arise from biases in the criterion and from unreliability.
• Criterion deficiency means that the actual criterion does not adequately cover the entire theoretical criterion. The actual criterion is an incomplete representation of what we are trying to assess.
• Criterion relevance is the extent to which the actual criterion assesses the theoretical criterion it is designed to measure, or its construct validity. The closer the correspondence between the actual and theoretical criteria, the greater the relevance of the actual criterion.
• 3 reasons for disparity between AC and TC

  • Criterion Contamination
  • Criterion Deficiency
  • Criterion Relevance
• Level of Specificity


  For developing an employee’s skills, it is better to focus at the individual task level so that feedback can be specific.

  For administrative purposes, overall job performance might be of more concern. The person who gets promoted might be the one whose overall performance has been the best.Most jobs are complex and involve many different functions and tasks. Job performance criteria can be developed for individual tasks or for entire jobs.
• Criterion Complexity

  Multiple tasks are often assessed from different perspectives. Also depends on nature of job (labour intensive – less complex)
• Deal with Criterion Complexity

  1. Composite Criterion
  2. Multidimensional approach
• The composite criterion approach involves combining individual criteria into a single score. It is preferred for comparing the performance of individual employees. It is easier to compare employees when each has a single performance score.
• The multidimensional approach does not combine the individual criterion measures. It is preferred when feedback is given to employees. It gives specific information about the various dimensions of performance rather than general feedback about overall performance.
• Variability of performance over time is referred to as the dynamic criterion, although it is the performance and not the standard that changes. Doesn’t predict long-term success. The best performers don’t necessarily remain the best performers in the long run.
• Contextual performance consists of extra voluntary things employees do to benefit their coworkers and organizations, such as volunteering to carry out extra tasks or helping coworkers. Contextual performance is noticed and appreciated by managers, and their ratings of subordinate performance will be affected by it.
• Assessing Job Performance


  • Objective measures are counts of various behaviors (e.g., number of days absent from work) or of the results of job behaviors (e.g., total monthly sales).
  • Subjective measures are ratings by people who should be knowledgeable about the person’s job performance.
• The most popular type of subjective measure is the graphic rating form, which is used to assess individuals on several dimensions of performance. The graphic rating form focuses on characteristics or traits of the person or the person’s performance. For example, most forms ask for ratings of work quality and quantity. Many include personal traits such as appearance, attitude, dependability, and motivation.
• The behavior-focused forms concentrate on behaviors that the person has done or could be expected to do. Behaviors are chosen to represent different levels of performance. For attendance, an example of good behavior would be “can be counted on to be at work every day on time,” whereas poor behavior would be “comes to work late several times per week.” The rater’s job is to indicate which behaviors are characteristic of the person being rated.
• Advantages of graphic

  • be easy to interpret the meaning of objective measures in relation to job performance criteria.
  • quantitative nature of objective measures makes it easy to compare the job performance of different individuals in the same job.
  • objective measures can be tied directly to organizational objectives,
  • objective measures can often be found in organizational records, so that special performance appraisal systems do not have to be initiated
• Limitations

  • Many of the objective measures are not appropriate for all jobs.
  • Also, it is not always obvious what number is considered satisfactory performance.
  • Data taken from records can be contaminated and inaccurate. Sometimes behaviours and productivity are attributed to the wrong person or are never recorded.
  • Qualitative aspect is ignored
  • Doesn’t consider what is not under control