Reference no: EM133164209

Could someone please help me answer the following questions based on the information provided;

1. Can you think of other ways to minimize the problem of inconsistency between managers' ratings?

2. What are other ways that inconsistent ratings from managers are damaging for employees?

Inconsistent ratings: How can the problem of inconsistency between managers who are rating workers be solved or at least diminished? Make two or more suggestions.

Current Situation

Performance appraisals are an important tool used by managers to evaluate their employees' performance, productivity, and effectiveness. It is helpful for both the employee getting the appraisal as well as the organization as it aligns employee action with strategic goals, is a vehicle for culture change, and provides input to other HR systems (Dessler & Chhinzer, 2019). However, that being said, it is a difficult interpersonal task for managers as an honest appraisal involves an emotional component. In addition, there are some problems associated with appraisal techniques including the impact of biases and unclear performance standards which can lead to inconsistency between managers' ratings.

Link to HR

As mentioned above, when it comes to giving employees ratings in performance appraisals, there are several factors that can lead to inconsistencies in managers' ratings. Some biases, such as appraisal bias and halo effect, may impact a manager's rating for an employee (Dessler & Chhinzer, 2019). This is important to address as it may lead to confusion or frustration for the employee when given differing ratings. In addition, performance appraisals impact an employee's job satisfaction, engagement, productivity, and organizational commitment (Deepa et al., 2014), so receiving contradicting appraisals may lead to a distrust in the system, thus negatively impacting these factors.

Deeper Dive

My two suggestions for how to diminish the inconsistency among managers' rating both have to do with leading the managers to think more critically about each rating. Firstly, I think that for each criterion they rate the employee on, the appraisal should include guiding questions that force managers to pause and give more careful consideration. This may help to refrain managers from jumping to conclusions and falling back on biases such as recency effect or similar to me bias. The second suggestion I have is to require managers to provide an explanation for each rating; including what the employee does well and what they could improve on. This could be helpful for if and when an inconsistency occurs, managers will be able to see why their rating differ. In addition, it may help to alleviate some confusion from employees if an inconsistency still occurs. For example, one manager may have experienced a certain situation with the employee that raised or lowered the rating for a certain criterion that another manager did not.