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Performance Evaluation
7 List the methods of performance evaluation
Would you study differently or exert a different level of effort for a college course graded on a pass-fail basis then for one that awarded letter grades A to F? Students typically tell us they study harder when letter grades are at stake. When They take a course on a pass-fail basis, they tend to do just enough to ensure a passing grade.
What applies in the college context also applies to employees at work. In this section, we show how the choice of a performance evaluation system and the way it’s administered can be an important force influencing employee behavior.
What Is Performance?
In the past, most organizations assessed only how well employees performed the tasks listed on a job description, but today’s less hierarchical and more service-oriented organizations require more. Researchers now recognize three major types of behavior that constitute performance at work :
1.Task performance. Performing the duties and responsibilities that con-tribute to the production of a good or service or to administrative tasks. This includes most of the tasks in a conventional job description.
2.Citizenship. Actions that contribute to the psychological environment of the organization, such as helping others when not required, supporting organizational objectives, treating co-workers with respect, making constructive suggest ions, and saying positive things about the workplace.
3.Counterproductivity. Actions that actively damage the organization. These behaviors include stealing, damaging company property, behaving aggressively toward co-workers, and taking avoidable absences.
Most managers believe good performance means doing well on the first two dimensions and avoiding the third. A person who does core job tasks very well
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but is rude and aggressive toward co-workers is not going to be considered a good employee in most organizations, and even the most pleasant and upbeat worker who can’t do the main job tasks well is not going to be a good employee.
Purposes of Performance Evaluation
Performance evaluation serves a number of purposes. One is to help management make general human resource decisions about promotions, transfers, and terminations. Evaluations also identify training and development needs. They pinpoint employee skills and competencies for which remedial programs can be developed. Finally, they provide feedback to employees on how the organization views their performance and are often the basis for reward allocations, including merit pay increases.
Because our interest is in organizational behavior, here we emphasize performance evaluation as a mechanism for providing feedback and determining reward allocations.
What Do We Evaluate? The criteria management chooses to evaluate will have a major influence on what employees do. The three most popular sets of criteria are individual task outcomes, behaviors, and traits.
Individual Task Outcomes If ends count rather then means, management should evaluate an employee’s task on outcomes such as quantity produced, scrap generated, and cost per unit of production for a plant manager or on overall sales volume in the territory, dollar increase in sales, and number of new accounts established for a salesperson.
Behaviors It is difficult to attribute specific outcomes to the actions of employees in advisory or support positions or employees whose work assignments are part of a group effort. We may readily evaluate the group’s performance, but if it is hand to identify the contribution of each group member, management will often evaluate the employee’s behavior. A plant manager might be evaluated on promptness in submitting monthly reports or leadership style, and a salesperson on average number of contact calls made per day or sick days used per year.
Measured behaviors needn’t be limited to those directly related to individual productivity. As we pointed out in discussing organizational citizenship behavior (see Chapters 1 and 3), helping others, making suggestions for improvements, and volunteering for extra duties make work groups and organizations more effective and often are incorporated into evaluations of employee performance.
Traits The weakest criteria, because they’re furthest removed form actual job performance, are individual traits. Having a good attitude, showing confidence, being dependable, looking busy, or possessing a wealth of experience may or may not be highly correlated with positive task outcomes, but it’s naïve to ignore the reality that organizations still use such traits to assess job performance.