Job performance review presents an important source of feedback that can contribute to the organizations’ overall development. Not only does it provide information about individual employees, but it also can affect their future performance. On the one hand, employees can use this feedback for personal improvement, capitalizing on their strengths and working on their flaws. On the other hand, however, poor review execution and methods can lead to the employees’ demotivation and eventually result in a performance loss. According to Chun et al. (2018), the success of a performance review is based on the extent to which employees consider it fair regarding themselves. The fairness of a review revolves around several factors that managers should consider when they conduct the evaluation.
A common issue is when an employee is not satisfied with the evaluation because he thinks some aspects of his job were omitted in the process. Although it might not be possible to consider everything in the evaluation process, a rewarding practice is to increase the scope of the review to include an individual’s personality. For example, the employee’s relations with his colleagues might not directly impact his job performance. Nevertheless, it contributes to the workplace environment and personal job motivation. Another example of personality consideration in a performance review is evaluating how an employee communicates with clients and customers. A neutral attitude might not immediately impact the service provision, but it does not motivate a client to request this service again in the future.
A topic of employee-customer relations can be further expanded to the customers’ feedback consideration in the evaluation process. McShane and Glinow (2015) note that managers’ views on an individual’s performance often vary from the customers’ opinions. This fact might imply the managers’ subjectivity or perceptional biases as well as indicate the difference in the evaluation criteria. In this regard, many companies forsake the performance evaluation processes, stating its inefficiency (McShane & Glinow, 2015). Apart from perceptional issues, managers denote the numerical rating because of its inability to express the natural state of an employees’ performance. A good alternative in this context might be the usage of adjectives instead of numbers in the evaluation questionaries or their combinations. This approach provides additional personalization to the review, thus making it more appealing and understandable to the employees. However, it does not address the issue of perceptional bias; moreover, it does not solve the question of proper criteria for the evaluation.
Different companies are trying to approach the mentioned issues from different angles. While the subjectivity cannot be ultimately excluded from the evaluation process, the organizations choose to instead motivate their employees to the extent that they change their focus to more positive manners. San et al. (2021) researched employees’ motivation impacted by incentives that directly depend on the performance reviews. They found that moderate and proportional rewards encourage employees to work on their performance and provide the best services possible (San et al., 2021). In this case, employees use the performance reviews as indicators, thus assessing their future course of action personally.
Regarding the choice of appropriate metrics for evaluation, some studies provide the solution by testing the impact of provided reference points. Chun et al. (2018) compared the perceived fairness of the individual’s performance review with reference to his previous evaluation and with reference to other employees’ results. The former was confirmed to achieve a substantially higher perceived fairness (Chun et al., 2018). When people are concerned only with their own performance, they tend to think less about the scope of the job aspects in the evaluation.
References
Chun, J., Brockner, J., & De Cremer, D. (2018). People don’t want to be compared with others in performance reviews. They want to be compared with themselves. Harvard Business Review. Web.
McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2015). Organizational behavior: Emerging knowledge, global reality. McGraw-Hill Education.
San, A. A. R., Yahya, M., Fattah, M. N., Toha, A., Kembauw, E., & Sangadji, M. (Eds.). (2021). Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Singapore. IEOM Society International. Web.