Page 166 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

appraisal methods 149
self-appraisal before they are informed of the appraisal of the superior, and in this way
the employees achieve a basic understanding of the system. It can be useful to integrate
the employees’ self-evaluations, especially to discuss their future development, but in-
experienced superiors are often afraid of discussing ratings with their employees and
have to be trained for this task.
When comparing the superior’s evaluation with the self-evaluation, one can often
detect obvious tendencies towards leniency in the self-evaluation. If it is clear from
the start that in addition to the self-evaluation there is also an appraisal by others, this
tendency fades. In this case, the self-evaluations are often critical and realistic.
In less formalized systems there is only a rough structure for feedback. In this case the
discussion is more like an informal dialogue between superior and employee, where they
discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the employee and his or her expectations for
the future. It is more or less a career consulting dialogue. However, this less formalized
procedure can only be recommended when the managers and the corporate culture have
a tradition of giving and receiving feedback.

TREND TOWARDS A “BETTER”EVALUATION
When an organization is using an appraisal system, a tendency towards a “better” eval-
uation is a consequence of any such system; i.e., the appraisals are improving over the
course of time. There are many reasons for this tendency:

The employee makes progress.

The dimensions of the appraisal system are well known and employees will oriented

their behaviour according to these criteria.
The superiors try to avoid conflicts with their employees and give better ratings.

The superiors give better ratings because their goal is to develop their employees.

The executives enforce the positive development of their employees.

There are several ways to deal with this problem, but none is really satisfactory. First,
the superior or another person, whose task is to ensure quality of the evaluation, discusses
the ratings with the appraiser and gives him or her feedback. The person who provides the
feedback has to discover if the better evaluation is realistic or if the appraiser has avoided
negative ratings.
Second, one can simplify the evaluation system as much as possible. In the simplest
case scenario, the task of the appraiser is to assess whether or not the company’s ex-
pectations were met. With this dichotomous appraisal, however, it is impossible to dif-
ferentiate within the group of employees who meet the expectations and those who do
not. Moreover it is not possible to have a detailed look at the strengths and weaknesses
of the employees, which is the basis for personnel development. Therefore this type of
simplification should not be applied.
Third, percentages for the distribution of each rating can be defined. For example,
if there are five rating alternatives, the restriction is that 10% can be in the best category,
20% in the second best, 40% in the middle and 20% and 10%, respectively, in the last
categories. This method is based on the basic assumption that levels follow a normal
distribution. The rating may not be fair because in reality the employees may not follow
this distribution.