PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

Issues in Performance Appraisal

Issues in Performance Appraisal

Introduction

Performance appraisal is a system of measuring, assessing and affecting an employee's job related performance, behaviors and results. The key goal of performance appraisal is to determine the productivity of an employee and finding ways of further improving the productivity. Apart from that, appraisals also assist in managing people and meeting company's long term strategic goals. The task of performance appraisal has become part gained strategic importance in integrating HR activities and long term business policies by the means of which organizations aim to evaluate employees, improve productivity and disburse rewards.

It is imperative these days for the managers to use latest techniques to encourage and maintain the current performance. It is the responsibility of human resource personnel to link the HR activities vertically and horizontally to meet the organizational objectives (Boudec, 2007, pp. 1). All the global markets reward productivity and the remuneration is linked with achievement of targets. The integral component of an effective employee employer relationship is performance appraisal. Management must devise set of tools and methods that provide feedback on efficiency. Actual productivity compared with the desired value allows management to identify inconsistencies. The key features of performance appraisal are to decide promotion, termination, pay raise etc. The success of an organization is dependent upon the employee efforts and their satisfaction with the job and appraisal is the technique by which these efforts can be linked with the strategic goals of an organization. Many organizations are dissatisfied with their appraisal mechanism which is probably an indicator of failure of the performance appraisal in motivating employees. The most distasteful and difficult task for the HR managers is indeed to appraise employees and has been viewed by both managers and employees as disappointing undertaking. Despite being one of the most important HR activities, it has remained a very contentious motion within the HR arena. The paper aims to discuss the factors of performance appraisal issues and how to move to an ideal appraisal system by removing certain common flaws in today's appraisal systems.

Discussion

The proliferation of bureaucratic organization during the Industrial revolution era saw the increasing use of performance appraisal as a means of monitoring the organizational output. The main emphasis of these designs was punishing employees for poor performance as a way of encouraging them to improve their performance. Gradually the transformation in the appraisal systems occurred where the focus became the rewards for good performance rather than punishment (Srinivasan, 2005, pp. 5). There are several dimensions of performance that are evaluated in an appraisal including duties, tasks, qualities and conduct. There is a fixed standard against which these dimensions are checked based on historical performance or any other criteria. The process of benchmarking assits evaluators in better evaluating the performance as deviations can easily be corrected.

Most of the appraisal design in use today can be categorized broadly into following structures: Rating scales, behavioral observation scales and management by objectives (MBO) (Kondrasuk, 2011, ...