Lecture 2 - Performance Appraisals Flashcards
What are the main purposes of employee appraisals?
- Employee development
- Motivating employees
- Who gets pay raises/promotions
- Retention/release decisions
- Program evaluation (is the training good?)
- Culture change
- Assess personnel selection
- Provides employees with clues on how to get raises (acts like a rubric)
What’s ultimate criterion vs. measured criterion?
- Ultimate criterion - obtaining a perfect measurement of your employees by knowing everything about them (impossible, not real)
- Measured criterion - what you can actually measure from your employees performance
- The degree to which these two constructs overlap will determine your construct validity
What’s construct validity?
- What your idea is of your employees’ performance
What’s the best method to ensure that the construct validity for an employee rating is more accurate?
- Recommend that you use multiple criteria and create a composite score for decisions (taking the average of the ratings)
What’s a global criterion?
- Asking an employer to give their employees an overall rating
What specific attributes are measured in a performance appraisal?
- Task proficiency
- Non-job-specific task proficiencies (ex. helping other employees, going the extra step)
- Written/oral communication
- Showing effort
- Personal discipline
- Facilitating peer and team performance
- Supervision/leadership (maybe move people up?)
- Management/administration
What are the three main attributes that must be assessed for good performance?
- Behaviours
- Performance
- Effectiveness
What’s modal performance?
- What’s considered the typical performance for a job
What does the term criterion dimensionality infer?
- The fact that 2 or more people can achieve the same performance with different methods of doing so
- That’s why it makes it difficult for managers to objectively evaluate employees
- Better to measure at the endpoint
What are some ways performance can be measured?
- Objective measures - considered the gold standard (ex. absenteeism, sales)
- Ratings - most common, but often companies don’t have enough data
- Performance tests - have employee complete a job sample
- Job knowledge tests - managers ask employees questions
- Electronic performance monitoring - How long employee spends on company tech, able to measure their productivity
What are some problems with using objective performance?
- There’s criterion contamination
- Only capturing a portion of the job performance domain
- Correlations between objective and subjective performance measures
What’s a restriction of range?
- No variability so the data can’t be used (can’t predict anything)
- Everyone gets the same rating
What’s the halo effect?
- The positive impressions of one employee will impact how they think they can perform in other areas as well.
Whats the similar-to-me error?
- People tend to rate people higher who are similar to them (unconsciously done)
- Not good for accuracy
What’s the first impression error?
- A good first impression on management will highly impact their perception of you for a very long time
What’s systematic distortion?
- People will have theories about which tasks should go together, so they think you’re good at both
- Can have negative implications for employees
What’s contextual performance?
- Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)
- Helping those who have been absent
- Defend the organization
- Offer ideas to improve function
What’s counter-productive behavior?
- CPB
- Not good behaviors for the company
- Damages equipment
- Fake call-ins
- Refuse to work overtime
- Talk back to boss
*Also called anti-social behaviours
Why may some employees lean into contextual performance?
- The work getting done may not be that altruistic, doing it to get noticed
- Might get a promotion
What did the Rotundo and Sackett study in 2002 discover regarding counter-productive behaviors discover?
- Used 3 domains of job performance: Task, citizenship, counter-productive behaviors
- Discovered that managers consider task and counter-productive are relatively more important than citizenship
- Managers differ in weighing these components
What are some subjective methods to do performance appraisals?
- Graphic rating scales
- Employer-comparison methods
- Behavioral checklist and scales
What are the advantages and disadvantages of employee comparison methods?
- Advantages: Avoids central tendency, helpful in making employment decisions
- Disadvantages: Hard to compare employees across different departments, can upset employees
What are the benefits of behavioral checklists?
- Overcomes problems of graphic rating scales and have to provide more accurate and valid performance ratings
- Based on critical incident technique (i.e., employees provide examples of good work) which helps build a scale
What are the two types of behavioral scales used to evaluate employees?
- Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) - different stories correspond to a different numeric rating on a scale
- Behavior Observation Scale (BOS) - Measures the frequency of behaviors based off of different statements
When can self-ratings be useful?
- Self-ratings can be closer to those of the supervisor when extensive performance feedback is given.
- Self-ratings are less lenient if rater knows that the ratings will be checked against some objective criterion
Who can rate employees?
- Supervisors (primary)
- Subordinates
- Self
- Peers
Why may ratings differ?
- Egocentric bias - the idea that you’re the only one who knows how hard you work
- Differences on organizational level - some may be more focused on results than others
What’s 360 degree feedback?
- Info from self, supervisors, peers and subordinates is used as a source of developmental feedback
- There can be disagreement among the feedback (higher disagreement between ratings of superiors and peers)
- Can be negative reactions to peer or upward feedback
What’s frame-of-reference training?
- Training raters with respect to performance standards as well as performance dimensionality
- Providing the definition of dimension, and sample of behavioral incidents for each dimension
- Train raters to share and use common conceptualization of performance
What’s behavioral observation training
- Making detailed notes on their performance
- Want to have the most detail on the employees
