Page 352 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

13. HRM PRACTICES
319
strategic decisions by raters about the sorts of evaluations they should
record (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995). Although previous research has in­
dicated the effects of employee race, sex, and age on performance eval­
uations, Latham and Wexley (1994) in a review of the extant literature
concluded that "it would appear that when employees make their work
visible to appraisers, when appraisers and appraisees together clarify ob­
jectives and task responsibilities, and when the appraiser uses behaviorally
based appraisal scales, ratee characteristics, such as age, race, and sex, have
a negligible effect on the resulting performance appraisal" (p. 152).
Nevertheless, under some conditions, it is easily conceivable that mo­
tivational, political, and interpersonal factors could result in performance
evaluations that systematically discriminate against members of specified
groups (Oppler, Campbell, Pulakos, & Borman, 1992; Sackett, DuBois, &
Noe, 1991). Such intentional, politically driven evaluation distortions can
be best addressed by organizational performance appraisal practices and
policies that alter discriminatory behaviors. Some of these are briefly dis­
cussed below.

Altering Discriminatory Behavior Through Performance Appraisal
Practices Using performance appraisals to alter discriminatory behav­
iors requires a fairly intensive set of activities. These include (a) using more
than one rater, (b) having raters provide written justifications (Latham &
Latham, 2000) or otherwise being demonstrable accountable for their eval­
uations (Villanova & Bernardin, 1991), and (c) making diversity a perfor­
mance standard for raters; valued rewards could also be linked to perfor­
mance appraisal accuracy (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995). We acknowledge
that some of these recommendations may be controversial. Nevertheless,
these approaches require a focus on contextual factors that have more to do
with raters' willingness to accurately evaluate performance and less with
their ability to make accurate judgments. Consequently, as postulated by
rational bias theory (Larwood, Gutek, & Gattiker, 1984), if discrimination
is a result of contextual and environmental factors, then we must change
these factors to alter or eliminate discriminatory behaviors by the majority
group members. For instance, Longenecker, Sims, and Gioia (1987) sug­
gested that executive managers who viewed appraisal as a sincere and
serious process were more likely to enact organizational cultures that in­
hibited deliberate rating distortions.

Compensation
Through the use of compensation practices, organizations attempt to both
reward and motivate various types of behavior. Compensation practices