Creating More Effective Performance Management Systems
The fact that evaluators frequently encounter problems with performance appraisals should not lead us to throw up our hands and abandon the concept. Managers can strive to make performance appraisals more effective. In this section, we offer suggestions to be considered individually or in combination, as illustrated in Exhibit 10-7.
Use Behavior-Based Measures
As we have pointed out, the evidence favors behavior-based measures over those developed around traits. Many traits often related to good performance may, in fact, have little or no performance relationship. Traits such as loyalty, initiative, courage, reliability, and self-expression are intuitively desirable in employees, but are individuals who rate high on those traits higher performers than those who rate low? Of course, we can’t definitively answer this question. We know employees sometimes rate high on these characteristics and are poor performers. Yet we can find others who are excellent performers but score poorly on traits such as these. Our conclusion is that traits like loyalty and initiative may be prized by appraisers, but no evidence supports the notion that certain traits will be adequate synonyms for performance in a large cross-section of jobs.
A second weakness in traits is the judgment itself. What is loyalty? When is an employee reliable? What you consider loyalty, others may not. Thus traits suffer from weak agreement between raters. Behavior-derived measures can deal with both of these objections. Because they deal with specific examples of performance—both good and bad—we avoid the problem of using inappropriate substitutes. Additionally, because we are evaluating specific behaviors, we increase the likelihood that two or more evaluators will see the same thing. You might consider a given employee as friendly, while we might perceive her as standoffish. But when asked to rate her in terms of specific behaviors, however, we might both agree that she “frequently says ‘Good morning’ to customers,” “willingly gives advice or assistance to coworkers,” and “always consolidates her cash drawer at the end of her work day.”