Introduction: Performance appraisal is a key element in setting the organizationalwork performance in the phase of continuously improvement within its employees,it ensures that the operations are running efficiently as it takes place at themanagement and the technical level. “Performance appraisal is defined as theprocedure that involves setting the work standards, assessing the employee’sactual performance relative to these standard and providing feedback to theemployee with the aim of motivating him or her to eliminate performancedeficiencies “(Gary, 2012). Generally, appraisal assessments are designed on aset of two basic frames: “What to measure” and “How to measure”, butnevertheless issues still arises and accrues due to over optimism and lack of monitoring.
In this report we’re going to address, identify and discuss several appraisalproblem such as Unclear standards, Halo effect, Central tendency, Leniency or Strictnessand appraisal bias. Literature Review: In performance appraisal there is several ways of appraisingsuch as the graphic rating scale, Alternation ranking method, paired comparisonmethod, critical incident method and management by objective. As evaluatorscarry on their duties the social context usually influences them and result incritical issues which identifies the key problems in performance appraisal. Ø Unclear Standards: Setting standards for evaluating the performanceeffectiveness is an important matter. However, having unclear standards is anissue that would probably result in unfair appraisals, because the characteristicsand degrees of merit are vague. Within the context of the UAE, an example of unclearstandards is usually founded across organizations in customer’s satisfactionsurvey and employees rating scales. An unclear standard makes the appraisalsystem unable to deliver all of its required benefits.
Theprocess have to ensure that each key term used is consistently understood. Thisissue can be fixed by developing and including descriptive phrases thatdefines each attribute.(Gary,2012) Ø Halo effect: The halo effect is an issue defined by, “The influence ofrater’s general impression on rating of specific rate qualities”(Gary, 2012).It’s usually due to a bias impression towards unknown or ambiguous attributes. Thistype of issue can create a negative atmosphere between the employees speciallythe Human resource department, as having a bad impression about a certainattribute on an employee would result in behavior conflict and misunderstandingthat leads to poor performance within the organization. Basically, the haloeffect could be found within any evaluating context, a very good example in theUAE can be described as “nice people tend to have nice attributes and lessnice people have less nice attributes.” Thus as if you like the way aperson dress, talk and interact you would probably rate him as slightly betterthan others or at least you won’t address the his bad working attributes as youshould be doing. The best way to alleviate this type of appraisal issue is tobe aware of the negative impact it can brings to the organization.
Ø Central Tendency: Centraltendency refers to the process of rating all the employees as average workerson the performance appraisal. Usually this issue tend to avoid the highs andlows on the rating scale (Gary, 2012). it gives the employees a very general rating which isquite unfair to their working performance. By having this issue of centraltendency it can affects the employees behavior and it also makes them lessuseful for promotion, salary or counseling purposes. Within many organizationin the UAE, Usually students from different universities have this centraltendency issue that result from the unclear and ambiguous standards on therating scale or the students themselves are not really interested in doing so.This type of issue is recommended to be solved by ranking employees instead ofusing traditional evaluation methods. Ø Leniencyand Strictness: Suchmistakes are related to general ratings.
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In most cases, these errors are found after carrying out several appraisalsas opposed to an isolated occurrence such as ‘Halo/Horn’ Effect.For example, if you are interviewing sixcandidates and you rate them all with “Excellent”, someone will doubtthat you are being lenient in evaluating the candidates. However, it is likelythat all six candidates could be “Excellent” as you rated them.
Leniencyin the United Arab Emirates is a big problem when it comes to evaluatingcandidates because, the nature of the U.A.E people is to avoid arguments . Strictness is opposite ofleniency. If you are evaluating six candidates and rated all of them poor.
Accordingto standard distribution, candidates must be marked as of what they trulyare. poor, below average, average, above average, and exceptional.Anothers study shows that it’s often that student evaluations of teachers aresustaintilly baised by low workload and grading leniency (march,2000) .
Interviewers are advised to rateindividuals separately. Each candidate has to stand out in some unique aspecteven if all have relevant evaluation and even if you use a standardizedcriteria to rate them. Ø Appraisal Bias: There are a lot ofreasons that causes bias in performance appraisals.
Some studies show thatpersonality of one person can highly influence the appraisal, for example if arater feels that the person he is rating has a great and confident personality,the rater might rate him with ” low ” because the rater feels thatthe person being rated might cause competition to him in the organization laterafter being accepted. However, if the person being rated is not smart, quiteconfident and nothing special about him, then the rater might give him a highrating so later when accepted in the organization there will be no competitionconflict to the rater. A study shows that high cost on information gatheringusually result in the performance bias (Bol, 2011). This is a very serious matter in the UAE because almost allof the national citizens of the UAE work in the government sector and when anew individual is applying for a job in an organization, existing employeesmight feel the threat of new entrants in the organization because new employeeswith motivation and charisma might affect the existing employees position inthe organization. ?position in theorganization. tees position in the organization. a , existing employees might feel threat fromnew entrants in Inorder for organizations to avoid such bias there raters might have, theorganization has to teach and make sure that there raters understand thepotential problems of performance appraisals and how there are consequences tobias rating. Another solution could be, instead of having one rater, theorganization can hire three rater to rate the same person, in this way theorganization can find out which of the three raters has a biased appraisal andlater be punished.
Summary: Through this report, we’ve highlighted the most commonproblems in performance appraisal within organizations. Firstly unclearstandards, which are defined, by vague standards that makes the system unableto deliver feedback. The halo affect and performance bias are slightly similarbut the difference is in the halo effect as the rater exclude out all the acceptedattributes in the rating process, and finally the central tendency that isbetter explained by theaverage rating of an employee, while at the other hand Leniency and Strictnessis defined by the issue with consistently high and low rating. In Order toavoid most of these issues we recommend the evaluaters to have descriptivephrases that defines each attribute in the rating scales and to avoid having an objective measure and ratherhave a specific and subjective judgement. Biblography: Bol, J.
(2011). The Determinants and Performance Effects ofManagers Performance Evaluation Biases. Gary Dessler and Akram Al Ariss.
(2012). Human ResourceManagement Arab World Edition. Russell Golman and Sudeep Bhatia. (2012).
PerformanceEvaluation Inflation and Compression.
