Ch. 6 Evaluating Employee Performance Flashcards
Define: Performance Appraisal
Means of assessing worker performance in comparison to company’s established standards and should be tied directly to performance criteria.
Performance Appraisal Uses…
- Personnel decisions (promotion, firing, transfer)
- Employee development and feedback
- Criteria for research (e.g., validation of tests)
- Documentation for legal action
- Training
Objective Methods of performance appraisals
Measures of job performance that are easily quantified
Counts of behaviors or outcomes of behaviors
4 Advantages of Objective Methods
- Consistent standards within jobs
- Not biased by judgment
- Easily quantified
- Face validity‑bottom line oriented
5 Disadvantages of Objective Methods
- Not always applicable (teacher)
- Performance not always under individual’s control
- Too simplistic
- Time consuming
- Potentially costly
Advantages of Subjective Methods
- Easy to use
- Inexpensive
- Can assess variables that objective methods can not (e.g., motivation, team spirit)
Disadvantages of Subjective Methods
- Potentially poor reliability between raters
- Prone to rater bias
- Rating errors: Leniency, Halo, etc.
- Supervisor subversion of system–leniency as a strategy
Sources of Performance Ratings
Supervisors Self appraisals Peers Subordinate Customers 360 feedback
Comparative Methods
Rank Order
Paired Comparison
Forced Distribution
Individual Methods
Checklist Narratives Graphic rating scales Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) Behavioral observation scales (BOS)
Common Rating Errors
Leniency or Severity - Halo or Horns
Primacy or Recency
Causal attribution - Actor-observer bias
Personal biases
Effective Performance Appraisal Review Interviews
Employee input prior to the meeting High level of employee participation Helpful supervisor attitude Focus on behaviors rather than traits Identification of solutions to problems Mutual setting of specific goals Consistent application of standards Rater is familiar with the employee’s work
Effective and Legal Performance Appraisal Systems….
Are job-related and based on a job analysis
Are properly administered
Provide specific feedback
Use appropriate raters
Criterion Relevance
The extent to which the means of appraising performance is pertinent to job success
Criterion Contamination
The extent to which performance appraisals contain elements that detract from the accurate assessment of job effectiveness
Criterion Deficiency
The degree to which a criterion falls short of measuring job performance
Criterion Usefulness
The extent to which a performance criterion is usable in appraising a particular job
Comparative Methods
performance appraisal methods involving comparisons of one worker’s performance against that of other workers
Rankings
Performance appraisal methods involving the ranking of supervisees from best to worst
Paired Comparison
Performance appraisal method in which the rater compares each worker with every other worker in the group and then decides who is the better performer
Forced Distributions
Assigning workers to established categories of poor to good performance with fixed limitations on how many employees can be assigned to each category
Individual Methods
Performance appraisal methods that evaluate an employee by himself or herself, without explicit reference to other workers
Graphic Rating Scales
Performance appraisal methods using a predetermined scale to rate the worker on important job dimensions
Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS)
Performance appraisal technique using rating scales with labels reflecting examples of poor, average, and good behavioral incidents
Behavioral Observation Scales (BOS)
Performance appraisal methods that require appraiser to recall how often a worker has been observed performing key work behaviors
Checklists
Performance appraisal methods using a series of statements about job performance
Narratives
Open-ended written accounts of a worker’s performance used in performance appraisals
Leniency Errors
The tendency to give all workers very positive performance appraisals
Severity Errors
The tendency to give all workers very negative performance appraisals
Central Tendency Error
The tendency to give all workers the midpoint rating in performance appraisals
Halo Effect
An overall positive evaluation of a worker based on one known positive characteristic or action
Rusty Halo (Horns effect)
Overall negative performance appraisal is made on the basis of one instance of failure or one negative characteristic
Recency Effect
The tendency to give greater weight to recent performance and lesser weight to earlier performance
Causal Attribution
The process by which people assign cause to events or behaviors
Two attributional biases
- The tendency for appraiser to give more extreme appraisal if they believe that the cause of a worker’s performance is rooted in effort rather than ability
- Actor-Observer Bias - the tendency for observers to over attribute cause to characteristic of the actor and the tendency for the actor to over attribute cause to situational characteristics
