Let’s take a look at what managers need to know about performance appraisal. Performance appraisal is the process of assessing how well employees are doing their jobs.
Performance appraisals are used for four broad purposes: making administrative decisions (for example, pay increase, promotion, retention), providing feedback for employee development (for example, performance, developing career plans), evaluating human resource programs (for example, validating selection systems), and for documentation purposes (for example, documenting performance ratings and decisions based on those ratings).
Workers often have strong doubts about the accuracy of their performance appraisals—and they may be right. For example, it’s widely known that assessors are prone to errors when rating worker performance. Three of the most common rating errors are central tendency, halo, and leniency.
What can be done to minimize rating errors and improve the accuracy with which job performance is measured? In general, two approaches have been used: improving performance appraisal measures themselves and training performance raters to be more accurate.
After gathering accurate performance data, the next step is to share performance feedback with employees. Unfortunately, even when performance appraisal ratings are accurate, the appraisal process often breaks down at the feedback stage. The advantage of 360-degree programs is that negative feed-back (“You don’t listen”) is often more credible when it comes from several people.
