Business ‘hates’ performance appraisals

‘The thing about performance appraisals is they are ubiquitous. There’s probably nothing in the field of management that is more common. And there’s also almost no practice in the world of business that people hate more.’

These are the words of Peter Cappelli, Director of Wharton University’s Centre for Human Resources. Despite the fact that performance appraisals are common, very little is known about how they work, for example, how the characteristics of the rater and ratee affect the eventual result. Also, the resources that individual employers devote to the process have been gradually pared down in recent years, Cappelli says.

For example, AT&T had a team of about 15 psychologists whose job it was to tinker with the performance appraisal form each year well into the 1980s. He suggests two main reasons for the cut backs and dilution of effort: line managers have too much other ‘stuff’ to do and the number of people reporting to each manager is now too big to make appraisal effective.

‘An Imperfect Test: The problem with job performance appraisals’, Peter Cappelli, Director of Wharton University’s Centre for Human Resources, May 2016: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-problem-with-job-performance-appraisals/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-05-25