Subjective performance Measures

Subjective measures are judgements about how an employee is performing. Generally, the supervisor is the one who makes such judgements, although in some instances, they may be gathered from co-workers and subordinates as well. Judgements can be made about either worker’s traits or workers’ behaviours, as shown in Table 3.

Trait Appraisals. A trait appraisal evaluates an employee’s personal characteristics such as attitude, motivation, cooperation, and dependability. Although companies commonly use these measures, they are problematic and not generally recommended as performance measures because they do not directly affect job activities.

One of the main difficulties with using trait appraisal is that there are no clear definitions of many traits. For example, some managers may define “cooperative” in terms of whether the employee assists fellow workers in completing work assignments. Other managers may define the trait as how willingly the employee does what the manager tells him or her to do. If traits are not clearly defined, managers find it difficult to utilize trait appraisal simply because they are not certain as to what to evaluate.

Behaviour-Based Appraisals. A second type of subjective measure, behaviour-based appraisal, evaluates how the employee performs job tasks. The items used in this appraisal must come from the job analysis. Table 3 lists examples of three types of behaviours used by a technical service firm in appraising its managers. These behaviour appraisals were developed by teams of both managers and non-managers. Notice that the dimensions to be evaluated are described in terms of either activities or results. The complete appraisal form contains behaviours necessary for project management, business development, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Subjective Measures. Subjective performance measures provide several advantages. First, they can permit the supervisor to judge all aspects of the employee’s work. Even those aspects that do not result in a finished product, such as the job task, “providing information to answer customers’ questions about various bank services”, can be evaluated by a supervisor who monitors the interactions between the receptionist and the bank’s customers. Secondly, the evaluation of job behaviours makes it much easier to identify deficient performance and to determine specific methods of correcting deficiencies.

The disadvantages of the use of subjective performance appraisal generally relate to the errors that supervisors may make in judging performance. For example, leniency errors refer to rating all employees very highly; severity errors result in rating all employees very low; and central tendency errors result in all employees being rated as average. A halo error occurs when the supervisor judges that, because an employee is performing very well in one job behaviour, he or she is performing well in others and evaluates the employee highly in all aspects even if this is not the case. However, these errors generally can be overcome through training.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 922