Page 164 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

appraisal methods 147
“flexibility in working places”. To avoid these ambiguous interpretations, a description
can be provided, for example:

Flexibility means the ability of the employee to react in an appropriate way on different
circumstances and to adapt easily to new task areas of responsibility.
Now it is more likely that each appraiser has the same idea of the term “flexibility”.
But how can “flexibility” be observed? Which specific behaviour is related to it? To
realize standardization, behavioural examples for each dimension can be used. So the
appraisersknowexactlythegroundsonwhichtheycanjudgetheiremployees’behaviour;
for example:

Employee can easily switch to another theme; can adapt quickly to new tasks; produces
good ideas to solve problems; reacts appropriately in different situations.
The disadvantage of this close description is that it is of course less abstract and has
to be adapted to certain areas of responsibility. But for a successful appraisal system it is
necessary that the dimensions are explained and connected with behavioural examples,
otherwise there will be less standardization.
HOW TO ASSESS:RATINGS SCALES OR NOT?

Now that the superiors understand the appraisal dimensions and know which behaviour
they have to consider for each dimension, how do they express their evaluation? There are
some methods but we will only refer to two possibilities which show the extremes. Per-
formance appraisal systems may have a rating scales for every dimension, for example:
Achievement motivation

1 2 3 4 5

The superior decides on a score. The rating scales can have different ranges and often
this is a well-discussed process to agree on a rating range. The general question is: should
it be an equal number of alternatives or not? The number of alternatives varies in most
cases between three and seven.
Moreover, it makes sense to divide the scale into three main levels: below level, level,
and above level. So a rating scale of five alternatives can be divided as follows:

Team Working

1 2 3 4 5
below level level above level

How can it be ascertained that a rating of 4 is comparable between the different
appraisers? For this purpose, brief descriptions of every level can be given, as shown
below. Of course it would be best if every step had its own description. But it turns
out to be very difficult to describe the difference between a 3 and a 4 with behavioural
examples. To give an orientation to the appraiser and avoid complicated descriptions, it
is often a good solution to provide behavioural descriptions for the three main levels.