Suppose you are a manager and have to choose a set of evaluation instruments for assessing the work performance of your employees. Pick any job you wish. Pages 145-154 of the textbook describe three g

EVALUATION INSTRUMENTS

So far, the topic of performance evaluation has been at a very general level. Let’s get down in the weeds and examine some very specific approaches to evaluation. There is a host of instruments that have been proposed and used in an attempt to measure performance in a reliable and valid way with high levels of accuracy, precision, and fairness. Mostly, the attempts are efforts to produce credible subjective measures.

Checklists

One approach is to have the appraisers go through a list of job-relevant behaviors and score the worker in terms of the number of behaviors observed during the per-formance period. Ideally, the list of behaviors would be generated from a job analysis. The simplest form of the checklist is to just count the number of behaviors checked by the appraiser. This is a “down-and-dirty” approach that yields very little valuable information. Two variations on the checklist instrument are the weighted checklist and the forced-choice checklist.

WEIGHTED CHECKLIST

The problem with the standard checklist is that not all of the behaviors are of equal value. The job of a bank teller is not only to handle money, but also includes greeting the customers, answering questions, and keeping the workspace organized. Of these four behaviors, clearly handling the money is the most important, but the standard checklist would give it the same value as the others. The weighted checklist, however, assigns a value (weight) to each behavior so that the final tally will reflect the differences in importance of the behaviors. Here is what a weighted checklist for team behaviors might look like: Check all that apply: 1. _____ Cooperates fully on team tasks (3) 2. _____ Attends meetings on time (1) 3. _____ Assumes leadership role when working in teams (5) 4. _____ Gives information during group discussions (2) Now, when one or more of these behaviors is checked off and counted, the tally reflects the weight assigned (shown in parentheses on the right side). If Paul is evaluating

Mary and checks behaviors 1, 3, and 4, she will get a total scored of 10 (3 + 5 + 2 = 10). If Paul is evaluating Sue and checks behaviors 1, 2, and 4, she will get a total score of 6 (3 + 1 + 2 = 6). In this case, Mary is a better team member than Sue, mainly because she is willing to take on a leadership role, which is a highly valued behavior for this organization. How are the weights established? This is frequently done by SMEs (often groups of supervisors). The weights themselves are typically not shown to either the evaluator or the worker. This practice serves two purposes. This releases the evaluators from the leniency bias because, if they do not know the value of the behaviors, selecting one is not seen as more positive than selecting another (although there is a chance that the evaluator may be able to guess the values). Keeping the weights disguised also tends to neutralize the punitive nature of the evaluation for the workers for the same reason (all the items are seen as positive, unless workers are able to guess their value).

FORCED-CHOICE CHECKLIST

The idea behind the forced-choice checklist is to create a set of behavioral items that appear to be of equal value and then have the evaluator pick which item is most characteristic of the employee. In reality, one of the items in the set has a high value and the other (or others, if there are more than two) has lower values. If the evaluator consistently picks the high-value items, then the employee scores high; if low-value items are consistently selected, the employee scores low. There are many variations of the forced-choice procedure, but a simple version is shown below: Check the one item in the pair that most applies to the employee: Pair # 1 1. _____ Takes initiative in starting new projects 2. _____ Provides helpful information for planning new projects

Pair #2 1. _____ Is dependable and gets to meetings on time 2. _____ Works cooperatively with others on the team

For the first pair, although both behaviors are positive, item 1 is the preferred behavior. In the second pair, item 2 is the preferred behavior. The forced-choice checklist is a bit more difficult to construct than the weighted checklist. Although the item pairs could be determined by SMEs, a far better method is to generate a pool of behavioral statements and then correlate them with other performance measures (e.g., sales, work quality, customer comments). From these correlations, statements can be selected from those that have a high correlation with these other measures and those that have a low correlation with these other measures. The high-correlation items can then be paired with the low-correlation items. For example, for a technology firm, in the first pair above, item 1 might correlate highly