Resumo de Performance Appraisal Issues

PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL ISSUES
PERFORMANCE appraisal has been one of the most debated management practices for several decades. It has generated a wide variety of viewpoints. Here I will concentrate, due to paucity of time and space, on appraisal objectives and its linkages with pay and rewards.
Typically, performance appraisal schemes serve multiple objectives. It is centrally linked to the motivation of employees. It provides some of the essential components of effective motivational strategies; in particular, feedback that permits an employee to learn how well he or she is performing; goal or objective-setting that specifies what the person should be doing; team building that allows the employee to participate along with peers and his superiors in solving problems that impede his productivity; and monetary incentives that reward good performance.
Performance appraisal leads to the identification of the training and development needs of the employees. It also has close links with other important areas of human resource management, in particular with selection, motivation, and succession planning. Performance data provides relevant information required for validating selection methods, in assessing whether selection methods are bringing high performers into the organization.
Here the organization must not get trapped into the various pitfalls that come along with administration of appraisal system. The question that arises here is, how to avoid these pitfalls? A necessary condition for the effective management of performance appraisal system in any organization is the need to clarify and communicate to all concerned, the objectives that the system intends to achieve. Everyone in the organization especially the key decision makers should be fully aware of precisely what objectives the system of performance appraisal is expected to achieve, and the priorities within these objectives.
We must also not forget that the culture of the organization clearly affects appraisal relationships. The only possible way for organizations, to minimize the possible conflict among appraisal objectives, is to emphasize on climate setting that will facilitate achieving the objectives that an appraisal system intends to achieve. Thus what needs to be done is to encourage managerial styles that will lead to openness and frankness in relationships as a condition for establishing an effective performance appraisal system. The companies need to realize that the relationship between organization culture and performance appraisal system is a two way process implying that they can successfully use their performance appraisal system to bring about cultural change.
The next fundamental question of importance is, to what extent, if at all, links should exist between performance appraisal pay decisions. The general trend with regard to organizations suggests a tilt towards performance appraisal systems being linked to individual rewards and pay, even though substantial variations in organizational practices remain. The advocates of this trend argue that when performance appraisal system is linked to individual pay and rewards then all parties (appraisers, appraisees and reviewers) take performance appraisal more seriously. Organizations are likely to develop performance-oriented cultures, in which high performers are seen to receive extra rewards, and lower performers receive lower rewards. However the organizations must also be fully aware of the risks and issues involved before linking individual pay and reward decisions to performance appraisal system.
The issues that need to be looked into when pay and performance appraisal are closely linked are: the pay issue may overshadow all the other purposes of performance appraisal, there may be a tendency of employees to withhold negative information about performance, leading to less than frank appraisal discussions; employees may adapt their behaviors to focus only on receiving good ratings, rather than ggenuinely improve their overall performance. So the question arises what to do? Firstly the organization must realize that pay related performance appraisal is likely to be effective only where jobs are designed in such a way that allows individual performance to be measured. Thus in situation characterized by high interaction among jobs in achieving results, group-related pay systems may be more appropriate. Thus before establishing company policies on the matter, it may be good idea to read about alternative methods for rewarding good performance like gain sharing or tying rewards to team performance or the company performance rather than only to individual performance.Sometimes a combination of reward systems work much better and has fewer nasty side effects than a single way of rewarding performance

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