Page 69 - Communication in Organizations Basic Skills and Conversation Models

Communication in organizations 58

Psychologizing
Psychologizing means that a comment is made about a person’s character based on one
aspect of his functioning. For example, when an employee has difficulties in setting
priorities it may be said that he feels insecure and is not able to work independently.
Often a first result of ‘psychologizing’ is that the employee is labelled in a certain way.
When the manager ‘psychologizes’ in an interview (e.g. ‘You are the dependent type,
anyway’) it often results in the employee getting irritable. Moreover such judgements are
not concrete and usually do not give the opportunity for positive improvement in the
employee’s behaviour.

Preventing mistakes
There are numerous mistakes that can be made unconsciously. The evaluation should
therefore be made very carefully. The following rules of thumb can help to minimize
such mistakes.
• Evaluate over a longer period so that individual incidents are not the only items
evaluated.
• Evaluate according to the function.
• Do not compare with a colleague who has a different function.
• Try to understand your own evaluation mistakes. Be aware of them, so you can reduce
some of them.
• Note down the facts as much as possible during the evaluation period according to
concrete behaviour and achievements.

The performance evaluation interview model

We now outline the interview model, which is composed of four parts: the start of the
interview, composition of the agenda, discussion of the subjects, and ending the
interview.

Start of the interview

The manager opens the interview with a short summary of its goal and indicates how
long it will last (see p. 9).

In the interview at Dinner Ltd between Freddy Fortune and Charlotte
Cohen, Freddy says: ‘As you know the goal of this performance
evaluation interview is to discuss what has happened in the past period
and how we are going to tackle eventual problems in the forthcoming
period. We now have an hour for this.’
Furthermore he indicates the structure of the conversation and refers to
its preparation: ‘We had agreed that we would both think about certain