Reference no: EM132882409
Read the situation below and answer the questions given in the end. You are Mr. Ravi Nath, associate store manager at a local outlet of a major discount department store chain. You are preparing yourself for a meeting with Ms. Rina Rao, an employee who reports to you. You are somewhat apprehensive about this meeting. Under the policies of your firm's human resources department, annual performance evaluations are required for all employees to be conducted by their managers. Although your firm has an appraisal form that may be used, the actual format of the performance evaluation and the appraisal interview are left up to each manager to follow according to his or her needs and preferences. Prior to this year your approach had been to fill out a company performance appraisal form on each employee yourself. You then would meet individually with each employee, show the employee the evaluation that you had made, and discuss the evaluation and the future areas of improvement. You have had rather mixed results with this approach. In particular, Rina Rao, who is a lead employee (or working supervisor) in one of your merchandise departments, has been very defensive about the appraisals that you gave her on the last two occasions. In fact, you felt that she had become somewhat hostile and resentful of any suggestions for improvement that you had offered.
About three months ago you had attended a supervisory training programme that was offered by your company for store managers and associate managers. IIM professor was invited by the company to conduct a workshop, and during one of the sessions he dealt with performance appraisals. In that session, the professor advocated using the self appraisal technique in which the employee is given an opportunity to rate him or herselfThe professor stated that much research had indicated that when employees were allowed to appraise themselves, they tended to be more critical of themselves than were their managers. According to the professor, with this approach, employees were also more receptive to suggestions for improvement You decided to try this approach with Rina Rao. About a week ago you gave her a copy ofh the company's appralsal form and told her to fill it out as she evaluated her performance during the past year. You asked her to give it back to you a day or two before the scheduled meeting when you would discuss her self-appraisal and your own evaluation of her. Rina Rao filled out an appraisal form on herself and gave it to you yesterday. You were astonished to see that she had given herself a "superior" or "outstanding "rating in every category on the performance appraisal. Further, under the section entitled "Areas for improvement" she had left this section entirely blank.
You realize that this was not the outcome you had hoped for, nor was it consistent with what the professor had stated in his workshop. Your own evaluation of Rina Rao is that her performance has been generally average at best, with several areas of serious deficiencies that need major improvement. She is coming to your office this afternoon and have her performance appraisal interview.
a. Why was the self-appraisal of Rina not in line with the outcome that Ravi Nath had expected?
b. What in your view could be typical problems in implementing self-appraisal in an organization in India, and what could be the preconditions or steps to make it a success in Indian business environment?