Lecture 2 - Performance Appraisals

Question 1

What are the main purposes of employee appraisals?

Answer 1

• Employee development
• Motivating employees
• Who gets pay raises/promotions
• Retention/release decisions
• Program evaluation (is the training good?)
• Culture change
• Assess personnel selection
• Provides employees with clues on how to get raises (acts like a rubric)

Question 2

What’s ultimate criterion vs. measured criterion?

Answer 2

• Ultimate criterion - obtaining a perfect measurement of your employees by knowing everything about them (impossible, not real)
• Measured criterion - what you can actually measure from your employees performance
• The degree to which these two constructs overlap will determine your construct validity

Question 3

What’s construct validity?

Answer 3

• What your idea is of your employees’ performance

Question 4

What’s the best method to ensure that the construct validity for an employee rating is more accurate?

Answer 4

• Recommend that you use multiple criteria and create a composite score for decisions (taking the average of the ratings)

Question 5

What’s a global criterion?

Answer 5

• Asking an employer to give their employees an overall rating

Question 6

What specific attributes are measured in a performance appraisal?

Answer 6

• Task proficiency
• Non-job-specific task proficiencies (ex. helping other employees, going the extra step)
• Written/oral communication
• Showing effort
• Personal discipline
• Facilitating peer and team performance
• Supervision/leadership (maybe move people up?)
• Management/administration

Question 7

What are the three main attributes that must be assessed for good performance?

Answer 7

• Behaviours
• Performance
• Effectiveness

Question 8

What’s modal performance?

Answer 8

• What’s considered the typical performance for a job

Question 9

What does the term criterion dimensionality infer?

Answer 9

• The fact that 2 or more people can achieve the same performance with different methods of doing so
• That’s why it makes it difficult for managers to objectively evaluate employees
• Better to measure at the endpoint

Question 10

What are some ways performance can be measured?

Answer 10

• Objective measures - considered the gold standard (ex. absenteeism, sales)
• Ratings - most common, but often companies don’t have enough data
• Performance tests - have employee complete a job sample
• Job knowledge tests - managers ask employees questions
• Electronic performance monitoring - How long employee spends on company tech, able to measure their productivity

Question 11

What are some problems with using objective performance?

Answer 11

• There’s criterion contamination
• Only capturing a portion of the job performance domain
• Correlations between objective and subjective performance measures

Question 12

What’s a restriction of range?

Answer 12

• No variability so the data can’t be used (can’t predict anything)
• Everyone gets the same rating

Question 13

What’s the halo effect?

Answer 13

• The positive impressions of one employee will impact how they think they can perform in other areas as well.

Question 14

Whats the similar-to-me error?

Answer 14

• People tend to rate people higher who are similar to them (unconsciously done)
• Not good for accuracy

Question 15

What’s the first impression error?

Answer 15

• A good first impression on management will highly impact their perception of you for a very long time

Question 16

What’s systematic distortion?

Answer 16

• People will have theories about which tasks should go together, so they think you’re good at both
• Can have negative implications for employees

Question 17

What’s contextual performance?

Answer 17

• Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)
• Helping those who have been absent
• Defend the organization
• Offer ideas to improve function

Question 18

What’s counter-productive behavior?

Answer 18

• CPB
• Not good behaviors for the company
• Damages equipment
• Fake call-ins
• Refuse to work overtime
• Talk back to boss
  *Also called anti-social behaviours

Question 19

Why may some employees lean into contextual performance?

Answer 19

• The work getting done may not be that altruistic, doing it to get noticed
• Might get a promotion

Question 20

What did the Rotundo and Sackett study in 2002 discover regarding counter-productive behaviors discover?

Answer 20

• Used 3 domains of job performance: Task, citizenship, counter-productive behaviors
• Discovered that managers consider task and counter-productive are relatively more important than citizenship
• Managers differ in weighing these components

Question 21

What are some subjective methods to do performance appraisals?

Answer 21

• Graphic rating scales
• Employer-comparison methods
• Behavioral checklist and scales

Question 22

What are the advantages and disadvantages of employee comparison methods?

Answer 22

• Advantages: Avoids central tendency, helpful in making employment decisions
• Disadvantages: Hard to compare employees across different departments, can upset employees

Question 23

What are the benefits of behavioral checklists?

Answer 23

• Overcomes problems of graphic rating scales and have to provide more accurate and valid performance ratings
• Based on critical incident technique (i.e., employees provide examples of good work) which helps build a scale

Question 24

What are the two types of behavioral scales used to evaluate employees?

Answer 24

• Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) - different stories correspond to a different numeric rating on a scale
• Behavior Observation Scale (BOS) - Measures the frequency of behaviors based off of different statements

Question 25

When can self-ratings be useful?

Answer 25

• Self-ratings can be closer to those of the supervisor when extensive performance feedback is given.
• Self-ratings are less lenient if rater knows that the ratings will be checked against some objective criterion

Question 26

Who can rate employees?

Answer 26

• Supervisors (primary)
• Subordinates
• Self
• Peers

Question 27

Why may ratings differ?

Answer 27

• Egocentric bias - the idea that you’re the only one who knows how hard you work
• Differences on organizational level - some may be more focused on results than others

Question 28

What’s 360 degree feedback?

Answer 28

• Info from self, supervisors, peers and subordinates is used as a source of developmental feedback
• There can be disagreement among the feedback (higher disagreement between ratings of superiors and peers)
• Can be negative reactions to peer or upward feedback

Question 29

What’s frame-of-reference training?

Answer 29

• Training raters with respect to performance standards as well as performance dimensionality
• Providing the definition of dimension, and sample of behavioral incidents for each dimension
• Train raters to share and use common conceptualization of performance

Question 30

What’s behavioral observation training

Answer 30

• Making detailed notes on their performance
• Want to have the most detail on the employees