Essay, Research Paper
Pro: Performance Appraisals should be banned from use.
I. Position Statement
In the business world today, there are many stressors that take place in the
course of a working day. Employees have things to worry about such as deadlines,
meetings, presentations, and many other problems that they face during the day.
Performance appraisals just add to this on growing stress and should be banned
from use in organizations today.
II. Identification of the Issue
The definition of a performance appraisal is the evaluation of a person?s
performance. I submit that this definition makes the process sound easy and
effortless. A performance appraisal is used for many reasons and it shows how an
employee is doing according to standards that are set by the organization.
Accurate appraisals help supervisors to fulfill their duties as evaluators and
coaches. But the major reason that performance appraisals are being used today
is because they are supposed to give employees feedback on their individual
performance on the job. This process helps supervisors and managers to determine
promotion candidates, termination candidates, and to determine employee
satisfaction and employee needs. This process is done in different ways by
different organizations. Some organizations like to do performance evaluations
once every year, and some like to do it more than that. Most companies that I
read about like to do them once every year. The managers sit down and think
about how their employee is doing, things like attitude, effort, enthusiasm,
skill, promptness, and things of this nature are just some of the criteria for
performance appraisals.
In order to have any validity this process must be well understood by the
employees of the organization and specific goals must be set for each job. These
are the basic definitions and the process that managers and supervisors must go
through in order to accomplish performance evaluations.
III. Arguments
Senior managers and employees share a common aversion to performance
appraisals. Employee evaluations was an accepted practice during the mid 1980s,
it has now ceased to be a popular way of defining and rating performance. This
argument can be seen from two points of view, the manager?s point of view, and
the employee?s point of view. Managers detest the time, and paperwork
involved. They are faced with many difficult choices, and discomfort that often
accompany the appraisal process. ?By 1993 so many people had been laid off,
and so much had been written about restructuring and the many ?good? people
who?d been displaced, that the stigma was eroding for workers and the
incentive for managers to document failure was diminished.? (Kennedy PG 2)
Layoffs were happening so often that managers and supervisors were using the
word layoff, when it really meant ?fired.? Outplacement became an antidote
to confrontation. ?Why bother to labor over a detailed record of errors
observed, assignments missed, and attitude problems when drop-kicking the
individual into the layoff pool was simpler?? (Kennedy 2) Employees that were
in fact fired felt that they had a shared fate with other co-workers rather than
thinking about a lawsuit opportunity. One manager said, ?Why fire someone when
you can lay him off, complete with a goodbye party?? (Kennedy 2)
Another reason that appraisals are becoming more obsolete is because of the
high turnover rates. Many mangers and top managers are looking for more bodies
and more employees instead of in-depth appraisals of those already in place.
Should manager?s waste
their time doing appraisals on an employee that has only been in the
organization for three months and is already looking for another job? Managers
often give employees very high scores on performance appraisals just to avoid
conflict. They do not want to deal with angry employees so to keep their
employees satisfied they give them high ratings. Besides after managers do make
their decisions they must justify their assessments face to face with their
employees, which is something that most managers do not want to do. So if
something were really wrong how would you know it anyway? ? Since 1995,
another trend has emerged to further erode the importance of the review process.
Younger workers care less about performance appraisals than older workers did,
because they are less competitive with peers, and their performance appraisal
system in place that doesn?t rank people either against an arbitrary standard
or against peers.? (Kennedy 3) In the work world and even sports today, people
are competing against their own best efforts. Athletes strive to beat their all
time best performance and businessmen and women strive to better themselves and
prepare themselves for new and better things to come. Performance appraisals are
often very one sided. When I talk about one sided I mean that managers can base
their assessments on their attitudes towards the employees, or could just use
recent examples of behavior instead of overall performance. If a manager has bad
feeling or attitude towards an employee are they going to honestly assess the
employee or put personal bias into play?
Diane Kristen raises a very interesting point in an interview conducted by
Nancy Pekala. ?Differences in interpretation are particularly evident when an
employee changes supervisors. A long-term employee may have been receiving
superlative reviews for 15 years, but then a new supervisor will score the
employee lower. Did the former supervisor score the
employee too high, is there a personality conflict between the employee and
the new supervisor, or does the new supervisor just have a different definition
of what constitutes an ?8??? (Pekala 2) For employee appraisals to be
effective managers must have constant feedback to their workers, not just at the
time of the appraisal. One employee said, ?Performance appraisals give my
manager a chance to evaluate my performance over the past year. Sometimes the
information is a surprise to me.? (McCarthy 1) This is a prime example that
employees are clueless as to how they are doing on a regular basis. How can
employees be expected to change a certain behavior if they just find out about
it at the end of the year or before they are terminated? Often at times
organizations have generic appraisals not specific ones for each position. One
manager says, ?Our appraisals aren?t relevant. They don?t address the
actual performance issues I have with my employees.? (McCarthy 2) Employees
want clarity when they are being evaluated, if they truly have the desire to
improve they want to know exactly what they need to improve upon.
Employee performance appraisals are definitely a controversial issue that
organizations face today. Managers and employees are seeking better ways to
communicate with each other, and performance appraisals just aren?t cutting
it. Many organizations still require performance appraisals and require their
manager?s to waste their time doing something that is not relevant to their
employees. So why do we have such appraisals when they don?t help the manager
to better assess his or her employees, and they don?t help the employee
understand what they have to do to improve their performance on the job?
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