Who Should Do the Evaluating?
Who should evaluate an employee’s performance? By tradition, the task has fallen to managers because they are held responsible for their employees’ performance. But others may do the job better.
With many of today’s organizations using self-managed teams, telecommuting, and other organizing devices that distance form employees, the immediate superior may not be the most reliable judge of an employee’s
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performance. Peers and even subordinates are being asked to take part in the process, and employees are participating in their own evaluations. One survey found about half of executives and 53 percent of employees now have input into their performance evaluations. As you might expect, self-evaluations often suffer form overinflated assessment and self-serving bias, and they seldom agree with superiors’ ratings. They are probably better suited to developmental than evaluative purposes and should be combined with other sources of information to reduce rating errors.
In most situations, it is highly advisable to use multiple sources of ratings. Any individual performance rating may say as much about the rater as about the person being evaluated. By averaging across raters, we can obtain a more reliable, unbiased, and accurate performance evaluation
Another popular approach to performance evaluation is 360-degree evaluations. These provide performance feedback from the employee’s full circle of daily contacts, from mailroom workers to customers to bosses to peers (see Exhibit 17-2). The number of appraisals can be as few as 3 or 4 or as many as 25; most organizations collect 5 to 10 per employee.
What’s the appeal of the 360-degree appraisal? By relying on feedback from co-workers, customers, and subordinates, organizations are hoping to give everyone a sense of participation in the review process and gain more accurate
Evidence on the effectiveness of the 360-degree evaluation is mixed. It pro-vides employees with a wider perspective on their performance, but many organizations don’t spend the time to train evaluators in giving constructive criticism. Some 360-degree evaluations allow employees to choose the peers and subordinates who evaluate them, which can artificially inflate feedback. It’s also difficult to reconcile disagreements between rater groups. There is clear evidence that
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peers tend to give much more lenient ratings than supervisors or subordinates, and peers also tend to make more errors in appraising performance.
Methods of Performance Evaluation
We’ve discussed what we evaluate and who should do the evaluating. New we ask: How do we evaluate an employee’s performance? What are the specific techniques for evaluation?
Written Essays Probably the simplest method is to write a narrative describing an employee’s strengths, weaknesses, past performance, potential, and suggestions for improvement. The written essay requires no complex forms or extensive training to complete. But, with this method, a useful appraisal may be determined as much by the evaluator’s writing skill as by the employee’s actual level of performance. It’s also difficult to compare essays for different employees (or for the same employees written by different managers) because there is no standardized scoring key.
Critical Incidents Critical incidents focus the evaluator’s attention on the difference between executing a job effectively and executing it ineffectively. The appraiser describes what the employee did that was especially effective or ineffective in a situation, citing only specific behaviors. A list of such critical incidents provides a rich set of examples to show the employee desirable behaviors and those that call for improvement.