Performance Appraisal Methods

Performance Appraisal Methods

Ø  We can manage performance by focusing on employee attributes, behaviors, or results.

Ø  We can measure performance in a relative way, making overall comparisons among individuals’ performance.

Approaches are:

Ø  The Comparative Approach.

Ø  The Attribute Approach.

Ø  The Behavioral Approach.

Ø  The Result Approach.

The Comparative Approach

Ø  Rater compares an individual’s performance with that of others.

Ø  Comparative methods require that managers directly compare the performance of their employees against one another. For example, a data-entry operator’s performance would be compared with that of other data-entry operators by the computing supervisor.

Ø  Comparative techniques include ranking, paired comparison, and forced distribution.

Ranking Method

Ø  RANKING: The ranking method consists of listing all employees from highest to lowest in performance.

Ø  The primary drawback of the ranking method is that the size of the differences among individuals is not well defined. For example, there may be little difference in performance between individuals ranked second and third, but a big difference in performance between those ranked third and fourth.

Forced Distribution:

Ø  The forced distribution method also uses a ranking format, but employees are ranked in groups.

Ø  This technique requires the manager to put certain percentages of employees into predetermined categories.

Ø  With the forced distribution method, the ratings of employees’ performance are distributed along a bell-shaped curve.

Ø  Forced distribution on Bell shape curve:

Drawbacks to the Forced Distribution:

Ø  One problem is that a supervisor may resist (struggle, fight) placing any individual in the lowest (or the highest) group.

Ø  Difficulties may arise when the Rater must explain to the employee why he or she was placed in one grouping and others were placed in higher groupings.

Ø  Further, with small groups, there may be no reason to assume that a bell-shaped distribution of performance really exists.

Ø  Finally, in some cases the manager may feel forced to make distinctions among employees that may not exist.

Paired Comparison:

Ø  The Paired Comparison method requires managers to compare every employee with other employee in the work group, giving an employee a score of 1 every time he or she is considered the higher performer.

Ø  Once all the pairs have been compared, the manager computes the number of times each employee received the favorable decision.

Ø  Drawback: Time consuming method.