BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE APPRAISAL

MEANING: Barrier: A problem , rule or situation

that prevents somebody from doing something.

Appraisal: A judgment of the value ,

performance or nature of somebody.

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL:“Performance appraisal is an objective

assessment of an individuals’ performance against well defined benchmarks”

OBJECTIVE OF PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: Performance appraisal serves

basically four objective:1. Identification of individual needs. Performance feedback. Determining transfers and job

assignments. Identification of individual strengths

and developmental needs.

2. administrative uses/decisions: Salary Promotion Identification of poor performance3. Organizational

maintenance/objective: H R planning Evaluation of organizational goal

achievement Reinforcement of organizational

development needs

4. Documentation :

Documentation for H R decisions

Helping to meet legal requirements

FACTORS AFFECTING THE EMPLOYEES PERFORMANCE:

Work environment

Supervision

development

WORK ENVIRONMENT:

Lack of knowledge about organizational goals, objectives, strategies.

Lack of change management like business changes, processes, systems and procedures.

Lack of understanding of the company vision.

SUPERVISION: Lack of confidence in the employee’s

ability and willingness to solve the problems.

Lack of attentions on the performance problem .

Lack of attention of poor performance immediately.

Lack of understanding of performance appraisal.

Lack of use of performance appraisal feedback.

Lack of direction on the job.

DEVELOPMENT: Lack of knowledge about the

organization. Lack of knowledge about the

department. Lack of the complete knowledge of the

job role. Lack of clearly defined performance

objectives. Lack of skill and capability. Lack of support.

BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL:

Faulty assumptio

ns

Psychological blocks

Technical pitfalls

barriers

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS:

The assumptions which a manager taking consider to appraising the employees performance is fault/ wrong.

SOME SPECIFIC ASSUMPTIONS: The assumption that managers

naturally wish to make fair and accurate appraisal of subordinate is untenable. Both superior and subordinate show tendencies to avoid formal appraisal process.

Particular appraisal system

Personal opinion

Managers assumptions that employees want to know frankly where they do stand and what their superiors think about them are not valid.

PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCKS:

The utility of performance appraisal depends upon the psychological characteristic of managers.

Managers’ feeling of insecurity

Appraisal as an extra burden

Their feeling to treat their subordinates failure as their deficiency.

Disliking of resentment by subordinate. Disliking of communicating poor

performance of subordinates.

TECHNICAL PITFALLS: The main technical difficulties in

appraisal fall into two categories.

1. Criterion problem

2. distortions

CRITERION PROBLEM:

A criterion problem is the standard of performance the managers desires of his subordinates and against which he compare their actual performance.

DISTORTIONS:

It occur in the form of biases and errors in making the evaluation.

HALO EFFECT:

This distortions exists where the rater is influenced by ratee’s one or two outstandingly good (or bad) performance and he evaluate the entire performance accordingly.

EXAMPLE:

Employee grade

U a

v b

w a

x b

y a

z A

CENTRAL TENDENCY: This error occurs when the rater marks

all or almost all his personal as average . He fails to discriminate between superior and inferior persons.

CONSTANT ERRORS: There are easy raters and tough raters

in all phases of life. Some raters habitually rate everyone high, other tend to rate low. In such a situation the results of two raters are hardly comparable.

RATER’S LIKING AND DISLIKING:

Managers being human have strong liking or disliking for people, particularly close associates.