Page 148 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

130 appraisal: an individual psychological perspective
“the problems of face-to-face communication in an essentially monocultural work-
force may be insignificant compared to the interpersonal communication difficulties
which may accompany the more culturally diverse workforce that is forecast.”

While Kikoski is referring to the growing proportion US workers from Hispanic, Asian
or African backgrounds, the cultural diversity issue is likely to be even more marked in
the European Union, with its freedom of movement of labour. There is a double challenge
that this presents. First, the vast majority of research studies on PA have emanated from
the USA, and the extent to which the findings of these can generalise to other countries
is highly questionable; see Fletcher and Perry (2001) for an analysis of this. Second,
as already observed in this present chapter, relatively little contemporary research has
been directed towards the more psychological aspects of the handling of the appraisal
interaction. Again, Kikoski (1999) has something to offer on this point, advocating the
value of microskills training in interpersonal communications as relevant to appraisal.
But there is little empirical evidence of the effectiveness of such approaches to appraisal
interview training in the literature; nearly all the attention has been directed towards rater
training (Woehr & Huffcutt, 1994). Interestingly, however, there are some findings on
applying behaviour modelling training to appraisees (Stoffey & Reilly, 1997). However,
instructiononinterviewskillsandthehandlingoftheAIcanonlygosofarwithoutabetter
knowledge of the effectiveness of different strategies with different kinds of appraisee.
In other words, a contingency approach of the kind described by Klein and Snell (1994),
some of whose findings were alluded to earlier in the chapter. Once a manager has been
trained in handling the AI and has been advised as to the most effective strategies to
adopt with appraisees of differing needs, personalities and so on, success will largely
rest on how well the manager concerned knows and understands his/her subordinates as
individuals and can tailor his/her style accordingly. Thus, in the future more PA research
based on a contingency model is likely to be helpful.
Performance appraisal and the context in which it operates does not stand still, and the
rapidly increasing use of 360-degree assessment systems for development and appraisal
purposes is another aspect of this. Multi-source appraisal is a topic that can take a chapter
or several books to itself, and yet many aspects of it are likely to be susceptible to exactly
the same kind of phenomena as traditional top-down appraisal. Certainly, using several
sources of assessment does not necessarily eliminate many of the problems so frequently
found in conventional appraisal (Fletcher, Baldry, & Cunningham-Snell, 1998). Using
this kind of assessment input as part of the appraisal system will still pose the same kind
of challenges inherent in communicating performance feedback more generally. For
example, there is still likely to be a threshold above which individuals become defensive
to critical feedback. While recognising there are some unique features of 360-degree
assessment, the lessons of research on PA do need to be applied to it also.
Apart from changes in appraisal methods, the nature of the work that they relate to is
also going to be transformed and this will no doubt have implications for how appraisal
operates (Cascio, 1995; Sulsky & Keown, 1998). The predictions made about the future
are inevitably vague and sometimes contradictory; for example, Pilon (1993) suggests
that advances in technology will lead to a need for fewer but smarter workers, while Prieto
and Simon (1997) emphasise that better information technology can make jobs easier!
Although computers will make possible new forms of performance monitoring and
feedback mechanisms (Kulik & Ambrose, 1993; McCune, 1997; Stanton, 2000), it seems
certain that some form of appraisal interview or equivalent interaction will continue to