Judgement Errors

People do mistakes at the time of evaluating people and their performance. Biases and judgement errors of several kinds can ruin the show. Bias here refers to distortion of a measurement. These are of several types:

1. First impressions (primacy effect): The appraiser's first impression of a participant may colour his evaluation of all of the subsequent behaviour. In the case of negative primacy influence, the worker may seem to do nothing correct; in the case of a positive primacy influence, the worker can do no wrong (Harris, p.192).
2. Halo: The Halo error take place when one aspect of the subordinate's performance influences the rater's evaluation of other performance dimensions. If an employee has few absences, his supervisor may give the employee a high rating in all of the other areas of work. In similar manner, a worker might be rated high on performance just because he has a nice dress sense and comes to office on time!
3. Horn effect: The rater's bias is in the other direction, where one single negative quality of the worker is being rated harshly. For instance, the ratee hardly smiles, so he cannot get along with people!
4. Leniency: Based on rater's own mental make-up at the time of appraisal, raters can be rated very leniently or very strictly. Generally Appraisers find evaluating others complicated, especially where negative ratings have to be provided. A professor may hesitate to fail a candidate while all of other students have cleared the examination. The leniency error may render an appraisal system ineffective. If everybody is to be rated high, the system has not done anything to distinguish among workers.
5. Central tendency: An alternative to the leniency influence is the central tendency, which takes place when appraisers rate all workers as average performers. For instance, a professor, with a view to play it secure, may give a class grades nearly equal to B, in spite of the differences in individual performance.
6. Stereotyping: Stereotyping is a mental picture which individual holds regarding a person because of that people age, sex, caste, religion etc. By generalising behaviour on the basis of that kind of blurred images, the rater grossly underestimates or overestimates a person's performance. For instance, employees from rural areas may be rated badly by raters with a sophisticated urban background, if they view rural background negatively.
7. Recency effect: In this particular case, the rater gives higher weightage to current occurrences than earlier performance. For instance, an best performance that can be six or seven months old is forgotten conveniently while giving a bad rating to an employee's performance which is not so good in current weeks. On the other hand, the appraisal procedure may suffer due to reason of a 'spill over effect' which occurs when past performance affects present ratings.