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Getting Rid of Performance Ratings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

Melvin Sorcher*
Affiliation:
Westport, Connecticut
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Melvin Sorcher, 31 Dogwood Lane, Westport, CT 06880. E-mail: melsorcher@optonline.net

Extract

And the beat goes on. The same questions about performance appraisals keep popping up despite significant changes in work environments, contexts, and expectations over the past 2 or 3 decades (Adler et al., 2016). Even after decades of research and debate about the benefits and construction of performance appraisal ratings, no closure is reached or “best practice” identified. The application of ratings differs widely among companies, and the criteria, scaling, and language are tweaked by virtually every human resources group. In my experience, each organization believes that its performance criteria are unique. This should not be surprising because supervisors who observe and rate human performance do not react like a school of fish. What most human resources managers miss is that each of the supervisors who apply ratings are also unique, and they do not perceive performance consistently—except, perhaps, for the most exceptional and the poorest performers. Methods of quantifying or behaviorally slotting employee performance along a variety of dimensions to arrive at some accurate scaled rating have not made employees happy and are a painful chore for most supervisors.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2016 

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References

Adler, S., Campion, M., Colquitt, A., Grubb, A., Murphy, K., Ollander-Krane, R., & Pulakos, E. D. (2016). Getting rid of performance ratings: Genius or folly? A debate. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 9 (2), 219252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorcher, M., & Brant, J. (2002, February). Are you picking the right leaders? Harvard Business Review, 7683.Google Scholar