For Catherine Owens
Performance Appraisals
A good place to start to evaluate actual performance is to look to the performance appraisal to determine if and by how much an employee’s performance deviates from expected performance; this would have been confirmed by our earlier job-task analysis.
Many types of performance appraisal instruments exist. If you type "performance appraisal forms" in Google, you will get well over 174,000hits. Today's organizations tend to use some standard performance appraisal instruments. Here is a sample listing, with brief descriptions from Murphy and Cleveland (1995):
Critical incidents. The supervisor's attention is focused on specific or critical behaviors that separate effective from ineffective performance.
Graphic rating scale. This method lists a set of performance factors, such as job knowledge, work quality, and cooperation; the supervisor uses these to rate employee performance using an incremental scale.
Behaviorally anchored rating scales. These combine elements from critical incident and graphic rating scale approaches. This supervisor rates employees according to items on a numerical scale.
Management by objectives. These evaluate how well an employee has accomplished objectives determined to be critical in job performance.
360-degree feedback. This multisource feedback method provides a comprehensive perspective of employee performance by using feedback from the full circle of people with whom the employee interacts: supervisors, subordinates, and coworkers. It is effective for career coaching and identifying strengths and weaknesses.
Regardless of the actual performance appraisal tool used, what is clear is that the performance appraisal should appraise the actual behaviors of the expected performance. That is, you must ensure that the instrument captures all the tasks and duties necessary to make a judgment on the quality of the employee's performance. Unfortunately, this is not always the case; a good example of the performance appraisal instrument not being properly aligned with the actual job duties required was found in my study of certified diabetes educators (CDEs). (Seethe HRD in Practice feature box titled "Effective CDE or Ineffective CDE?")
