Chapter 8 Discussion Topic

Errors in performance measurement. So your company is actually evaluating people's performance, yay kudos to them. Whoops; they screwed up and, apparently, there are several opportunities and ways they could have done it.

One of the ways is the person who is evaluating compares the person being evaluated to themselves. "I'm effective and this person is kind of like me so they must be too." Have you ever had people say that you remind them of someone else? Have they ever compared you to someone they thought would be a compliment to be compared to, but you actually find it as an insult? Or you are actually nothing like that, and you wonder how much people actually pay attention to either your or that other person. My dad always used to compare me to him, when you're 16 and your dad is the least cool person you can imagine next to your 4th period math teacher this is a travesty and a big blow to the ego. This also meant my dad expected me to make the same mistakes he did when he was my age. But I wasn't my dad, and you aren't your boss/supervisor/whatever. This can be highly ineffective and research has demonstrated that this effect is strong, but can be considered discriminatory so be careful of doing this yourself.

Another way is that the person being evaluated is compared to other employees rather than to an objective standard, contrast errors can occur. This can be nice if you are what would be considered average or even above average in most situations and you work with a bunch of idiots, but it doesn't seem as nice when your are good or even just competent and you work with a bunch of over-achievers. It'd be like comparing a 9th grader from Panama (foreign exchange student -real scenario) 7th graders from the U.S., obviously the 9th grader is going to have a better understanding of the material so if the teacher were to curve the class then everyone else would look like complete incompetents when in fact they would probably test as normal for the age group.

Distributional errors occur when the rater only really uses part of the rating scale, you know the really strict teacher that never gives an "A" because "that is equivalent to perfection, and you aren't perfect", the teacher that easily gives an "A" - nice for the under-achievers, much anger induced from the achievers/over-achievers section, or the one that may not fail anyone but you still have to work extra extra hard for the "A"....ahem... This can make it difficult to see how the employees are actually doing.

Basically, when rating performance there should be a standard to be followed and even though you may be closer to some employees the best option is to just follow the standard and look at the overall performance of employees and do your best to show what's really going on.

What would be a good way to do performance evaluation? Should your relationship (how the employees associate with you) with the employees have any bearing on the evaluation, whether its good or bad? What are some other things that could cause issues with performance evaluation?