Ch. 7 Performance Management Flashcards
Performance management (PM)
a continuous process of identifying, measuring, and developing the performance of individuals and teams
Aligns performance of employees with strategic goals for the organization
Performance appraisal
- One piece of performance management
- Formal evaluations of an individual’s performance that occur periodically within organizations
The Performance Management Process
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Six Purposes
Strategic – Maximize employee contribution to the goals of organization
Administrative – Making salary adjustments, promotions, and terminations
Communication – Inform employees of expectations and their performance
Developmental – Improve performance of employees via constructive feedback and training opportunities
Organizational Maintenance – Succession planning and assessing the value of training programs
Documentation – Use performance appraisal ratings for criterion validity studies and to provide paper trail for firing
Performance Appraisal and the Law
- Federal law on fair employment practices also pertains to performance appraisal
- Charges of discrimination may be brought under Title VII
Litigation can also result from - Negligence – breach of duty to conduct appraisals with due care
- Defamation – disclosure of untrue BAD performance information that damages reputation of employee
- Misrepresentation – disclosure of untrue favorable performance information that presents a risk of harm to prospective employees or third parties
Serial position errors
- Primacy vs. recency effect
Raters are more likely to recall initial information about a person and what happened most recently (leaving out the middle)
Contrast error
- After rating a star employee, rater might rate the next person lower than they otherwise would have
- Comparisons against others vs. against set standards
Halo errors
- Halo vs. horn effect
- Liking or disliking a person could color the rater’s rating of them
Leniency errors
- Positive vs. negative leniency
- Tendency toward being a harsh or easy grader is stable within a person
Central-tendency error
Avoidance of extreme ratings
Absence of errors does not equal accuracy
Someone might deserve all top ratings, but a rater avoids to not look too lenient or to give person “room to improve”
Rating Scales
Graphic Rating Scales: 5-7 point scale
Employee Comparison Methods
Behavioral Checklists and Scales
Employee Comparison Methods
- Rank Order
High to Low - Paired Comparison
Each employee compared with every other employee
Best used with small samples - Forced Distribution
5- 7 categories (normal distribution assumption)
Employees must be distributed across all categories
Best used with large samples
Top-grading (“rank and yank”)
Behavioral Checklists and Scales
- Critical Incidents
Record of good and poor performance behaviors
Not usually quantified - Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS)
Combines behavioral incident and rating scale method - How do you know when your ratings are valid?
Compare them to objective performance (production, sales)?
How do you know that objective is representing “true” contribution?
Rater error training
- Taught to make fewer errors
- Taught about serial, leniency, halo, etc.
- Does not necessarily result in increased accuracy
Frame-of-reference training
- Calibrates raters, showing them what to look for
- Gives raters a description of what to look for as they make each rating
- Particularly promising
Rater motivation
- Refers to organizationally-induced pressures that compel raters to distort their evaluations
- They may be able to rate accurately, but unwilling to
- May engage in “conscious rater distortion”
Numerous reasons to inflate/deflate ratings
- No rewards for accurate ratings; no punishment for inaccurate ratings
- High ratings needed for promotion, salary increases, other rewards
- Ratings of subordinates are a reflection on the manager
- Want to avoid backlash from subordinate and keep morale high
- Raters could artificially deflate ratings to really get attention of employee and to leave a paper trail
Peer Assessments (3 Types)
Members of a group appraise the performance of their colleagues (those equal to them)
- Peer nomination – each person nominates someone as the best on some dimension
- Peer ratings – each member of group rates all the others in their work group
Peers have high inter-rater reliability - Peer ranking – each member of group ranks the other members of the group
Biased by friendship
Better for developmental (vs. administrative) purposes
“Your coworkers think you do a great job at teamwork”
“Your coworkers think you could manage your time more efficiently”
Self-Assessments
- Individuals have poor understanding of their strengths and weaknesses
“Better than average effect” or, among engineers, better than 75% of other employees
Positive leniency is a problem
Actor-observer effect
- We tend to attribute our own bad behaviors to environmental factors; whereas we attribute others’ bad behavior to dispositional factors
- Managers rate themselves higher than their supervisors rate them and also higher than they rated their supervisor
- Better used for developmental purposes rather than administrative
360-Degree Feedback
- Also called multisource feedback (MSF)
- Employees provide self-assessment and subordinates, peers, and supervisors provide assessments
- Results are compared
Based on two key assumptions:
- Awareness of rating discrepancies enhance self-awareness
- Enhanced self-awareness is key to maximum performance
- Disagreement among raters: error or potentially valuable information?
- Research suggests that improvements made upon this feedback may not actually improve job performance
Example: If your employees want you to be more sociable, and you change, that might not mean that you’re better at your job criteria
Feedback in PM Contexts
- Giving Feedback
Essential, but supervisors dislike doing it - Mum effect – reluctance or failure of individuals to provide bad news
- One-third of feedback results in decreased performance
Bad News Delivery
- News receivers prefer to receive bad news first
- News givers have slight preference to give good news first
- A bad news sandwich (give bad news, then good news) is effective for:
Maintaining rapport
Regulating news-recipients’ emotions and shrouding bad news - A bad news sandwich is ineffective when:
You want recipients to change their behavior related to bad news
The good news is irrelevant, insincere, or wishy-washy
When the news-giver does not follow-up the conversation to ensure news-recipient received and remembers critical feedback
-Bad news SOLUTION sandwich
Begin with relevant and specific compliment, then give bad news, then end with concrete way to address bad news
Three motives for seeking feedback from others
- Instrumental motive (self-improvement)
- Ego-based motive (defend or enhance self-views)
They already think well of themselves, so may seek feedback to confirm; will disregard negative - Image-based motive (look better to others)
Ask feedback when supervisor is in good mood or from friends
7 characteristics contributing to employee acceptance
- Solicit and use employee input
- Two-way communication during interview
- Opportunity for employee to rebut rating
- Rater’s degree of familiarity with ratee’s work
- Consistent standards applied
- Ratings are based on actual performance
- Recommendations for rewards that are based on the ratings
- Supervisor must be perceived as trustworthy
- To change, employees have to believe the ratings were accurate and believe they have control over their performance
