The Importance of Performance Appraisal

Yes, performance appraisal is really necessary. And, no, there is no better way to obtain the benefits. There are several books that argue in favor of abolishing performance appraisals altogether. But the procedures they recommend are merely workarounds; the steps they recommend to create an alternative to performance appraisal are the same ones that any [...]

No appraisal system is immune to legal challenge. Nonetheless, the risk of legal difficulties can be minimized if seven basic good management practices are followed. 1. Base the performance appraisal on an analysis of the job. 2. Define your performance dimensions in behavioral terms and support assessments with observable, objective evidence. 3. Keep things simple. [...]

First, there is no legal requirement that a company must have a performance appraisal system. No law compels an organization to review the performance of its members, just as no law requires a company to produce annual budgets or provide good customer service. Conducting performance reviews, creating budgets, and giving good service are simply accepted [...]

No. While many people believe that managers discriminate, either deliberately or unconsciously, in their appraisal ratings, research on performance appraisal indicates that performance ratings are remarkably bias-free. Tell Me More In a major research project published in Psychological Bulletin, Frank Landy and James Farr reviewed all of the research that had been conducted over a [...]

Yes. Deming and others in the quality movement correctly noted that individuals are rarely the responsible parties when quality problems arise. More frequently, poor quality is a function of system breakdowns and bad processes, not individual failures. Deming urged organizations to concentrate on system problems and not human problems. That approach may work well for [...]

There are several reasons performance appraisal doesn’t work as well as it might: No Ownership. Too often, neither the manager nor the individual has any sense of ownership. They weren’t involved in the design or administration of the system. They frequently are not trained to use it effectively. Finally, human resources rarely asks about their [...]

Does performance appraisal take too long? Let’s calculate just how much time the performance management process takes. The planning meeting lasts forty-five minutes to an hour, once a year. Writing some- body’s performance appraisal takes another hour, maybe an hour and a half. And the performance appraisal discussion takes about forty-five minutes with most people. [...]

You should have a minimum of two meetings. You’ll hold one at the beginning of the year—the performance planning meeting—where you will talk about the important results to be achieved over the next twelve months. In this meeting you and your subordinate will review the job description, the organization’s mission and vision and values statements, [...]

The performance management process in our organization has conflicting purposes. We use it to determine merit increases and performance feedback for work done during the previous twelve months, to determine training needs, and as a key tool in succession planning. Can one procedure really serve all those functions well? One of the fundamental problems with [...]

Performance appraisal serves over a dozen different organizational purposes: Providing feedback to employees about their performance Determining who gets promoted Facilitating layoff or downsizing decisions Encouraging performance improvement Motivating superior performance Setting and measuring goals Counseling poor performers Determining compensation changes Encouraging coaching and mentoring Supporting manpower planning or succession planning Determining individual training and [...]

There are early references to performance appraisal in America going back over a hundred years. The federal Civil Service Commission’s merit rating system was in place in 1887. Lord & Taylor introduced performance appraisal in 1914. Many companies were influenced by Frederick Taylor’s ‘‘scientific management’’ efforts of the early twentieth century and concocted performance appraisals. [...]

Performance appraisal is a formal management system that provides for the evaluation of the quality of an individual’s performance in an organization. The appraisal is usually prepared by the employee’s immediate supervisor. The procedure typically requires the supervisor to fill out a standardized assessment form that evaluates the individual on several different dimensions and then [...]