Appraisal Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Appraisal Systems - Essay Example Performance appraisal of employees resorted to by organizations has many objectives. Mohrman, Resnick-West and Lawler (1989) identify increase in motivation to perform effectively and to increase the self esteem of the employees as essential objectives of performance appraisal methods. They usually enable the organization to maintain a reliable record of the performance of each employee in order to determine the wage levels, incentives, salary increase, transfers and promotions. The performance appraisal methods also bring out the needs for training of employees at various levels in the organization. By studying his/her performance appraisal report the employee is able to improve upon his performance by rectifying the mistakes he/she might have committed earlier. There are various methods usually employed by progressive organizations to make appraisals of employee performance. These can be divided into three different groups; (i) individual evaluation methods, (ii) multiple person evaluation methods, and (iii) other methods. The individual evaluation methods are based on an assessment of the performance of the individual employees. ... The report is not data-based but merely represents the impressions of the superior about the subordinate. Since the report is mostly subjective the employee may not be sure of his strengths and weaknesses and is also not guided for rectifying his mistakes. Essay evaluation is a non-quantitative technique in which the rater is asked to prepare an essay based on the job knowledge and potential of the employee and the employee's understandings of the policies and programmers of the company. The attitude and perceptions of the employees are also taken into account while preparing the essay. This method has serious limitation of being a subjective one and sometimes the rater may be found to be poor in expressing his views correctly. Under critical incident technique the effective and ineffective behavior on the job of the employee is observed by the manager who prepares a list of incidents representing the poor or outstanding behavior of each employee. The manager periodically records the incidents and at the end of the rating period these incidents are summarized to evaluate the employee performance. This method is more suitable to assess the job of the supervisors rather than that of the employees at low levels. In the check list method a list of objective or descriptive statements about the employee behavior is included and the rater makes his observations on the employee performance by checking the particular trait of the behavior which he assessed the employee to possess and other traits are left blank. A variation of the method is to assign weights to different traits and summarize the assessment of the rater. One serious limitation of this method is that the rating is normally biased by the