Chapter 4
Performance Appraisal

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Feed back from supervisors is needed for employees to improve and maintain their job performance and job skills.
Employees need to know when they are performing well so that they will continue to do so and when they are not so they can change what they are doing.
Even employees who are performing well on the job can benefit from feedback about how to perform better.

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Many of the activities of practicing I/O psychologists concern the improvement of employee job performance.
The efforts of I/O psychologists can be directed toward designing better equipment, hiring more skilled people, motivating employees, and training employees.
A common design for a study involves comparing employee performance before and after the implementation of a new program designed to enhance it.

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A better design would be an experiment in which one group of employees experiences a new work procedure while a control group of employees does not.
The two groups could be compared to see whether the group receiving the new procedure had better job performance than the control group.
Better job performance by the trained group would serve as good evidence for the effectiveness of the training program.

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Criteria can be classified as actual or theoretical.The thoeretical criterion is the definition of what good performance is rather than how it is measured.
The actual criterion is the way in which the theoretical criterion is assessed or operationalized.
Example: For an insurance salesperson, the theoretical criterion is to sell and the actual criterion is a count of the sales the person made.

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The most popular type of subjective measure is the graphic rating form, which is used to assess individuals on several dimensions of performance.
This form focuses on characteristics or traits of the person or person’s performance.
A graphic rating form consists of a multipoint scale and several dimensions. The scale represents a continuum of performance from low to high and contains 4-7 values.

 Whereas graphic rating forms focus on dimensions that are trait oriented, such as dependability, or on general aspects of performance, such as attendance, behavior focused forms concentrate on specific instances of behavior that the person has done or could be expected to do.

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A BARS performance evaluation form contains several individual scales, each designed to assess an important dimension of job performance. A BARS performance can be used to assess the same dimensions as a graphic rating form.
The major difference is that the BARS uses response choices that represent behaviors, and the graphic rating form asks for a rating of how well the person performs along the dimension in question.

 MSS provides the rater with a list of behaviors that vary in their effectiveness.
For each statement, the rater is asked to indicate if:
 The rate is better than the statement.
 The statement fits the ratee.
 The ratee is worse than the statement.

 The BOS contains items that are based on critical incidents, making it somewhat like a mixed standard scale. With BOS, however, raters are asked to indicate for each item the amount of time the employee engaged in that behavior.

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Step 1: Perform job analysis to define job dimensions.
Step 2: Develop descriptions of effective and ineffective job performance from critical incidents.
Step 3 Have knowledgeable judges place descriptions into job dimensions.
Step 4 Have knowledgeable judges rate the effectiveness of the descriptions.

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When supervisors or other people make performance ratings, they are likely to exhibit rating biases and rating errors.
These biases and errors can be seen in the pattern of ratings, both within the rating forms for individuals and across rating forms for different people.
Halo error occurs when a rater gives an individual the same rating across all rating dimensions, despite differences in performances across dimensions.

 Example: If a person is being rated as being outstanding in one area, he or she is rated outstanding in all areas, even though he or she may only be average or even poor in some areas.

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Distributional Errors: occurs when a rater rates everyone the same.
Leniency Errors: occur when the rater rates everyone at the favorable end of the performance scale.
Severity Errors: occur when the rater rates everyone at the unfavorable end of the performance scale.
Central Tendency Errors: occur when a rater rates everyone in the middle of the performance scale.

 Two approaches have been developed to control and eliminate rater bias and error.
One approach is to design better performance appraisal forms that will be resistant to these problems.
 The other is to train raters to avoid rating errors.

 The idea is that raters will be able to make more accurate ratings if they focus on specific behaviors rather than traits.
 Behaviors are more concrete than traits and so rating them requires less judgment.
 Example:It should be easier to rate how often a person is absent from work than to rate the somewhat abstract trait of dependability.

 The objective of Rater Error Training is to familiarize raters with rater errors and to teach them to avoid these rating patterns.
 In other words, the raters might reduce the number of halo and leniency patterns in their ratings, but those ratings are less accurate in reflecting the true levels of performance.

 In organizational settings, many factors may influence the willingness of a supervisor to give accurate ratings, including characteristics of supervisors themselves and the rating situation.
 Two factors that can affect ratings are: How much the supervisor likes the subordinate and the Supervisor’s mood at the time of the rating.

 Technology is having an impact on performance appraisal in two main areas: monitoring of objective productivity and performance management systems.
 Computerized employee performance management systems are becoming popular to help managers clarify goals and expectations, provide coaching and feedback, and evaluate performance.

 Many countries have laws that prohibit discrimination against minorities and women in the workplace.
 These laws cover organizational actions that affect the employment status of people, such as promotions and terminations.

 Improving performance appraisal systems represents a major challenge to the I/O field.
Objective measures are often deficient in not adequately representing the entire scope of people’s job performance. Subjective measures suffer from contamination as a result of rating biases and errors of the supervisors who assess performance. There is room for improvement with both of these measures.

 Research with some forms of rater training shows promise in improving the accuracy of subjective ratings. Training that focuses on how to observe good job performance and how to transform those observations into accurate appraisals of people’s performance seems likely to be effective.