Introduction
I am a Director of Human Resources for an internet matchmaking company. In recent months, the company has been sued by three employees who were laid off based on information in their performance appraisals. These employees have alleged that their performance appraisals did not accurately reflect their work and were based on inaccurate interpretations of work performance by the managers who prepared the appraisals. One employee has won her case and two others are currently pending in court. I have done some preliminary analysis and have discovered the problems lie in how the managers rate and measure their employee's performance. In order to prevent these problems from reoccurring I am going to tell you about four problems that occur when managers complete performance reviews. Then I am going to tell you what my suggestions are to prevent each problem. I will conclude with my own thoughts and views.
Problems with Performance Reviews
One problem that can occur is selective perception (Plous, 1993). In this kind of situation they only perceive what it is they are expecting to see. Sometimes a manager might have already set in their mind some kind of expectations. When someone does not do what they are told to do in a timely and accurate manner a manager could possibly review them as under performing and give a lower evaluation score. They should in fact be looking at that along with everything else such as quality of output.
Another problem that can occur is pre decisional dissonance (Plous, 1993). In this kind of situation they have some kind of bias against the person such as age or even sex. Let's ...