Human Resources Performance Appraisals

This paper should include sections on the strategic advantages of performance appraisals, potential forms of bias within the appraisal system, as well as how performance appraisals can contribute to the achievement of strategic objectives. Performance appraisal is considered a key tool for managerial needs of today’s organizations and is the process by which organizations evaluate job performance. A performance appraisal system usually requires a manager to rate each employee’s performance according to performance criteria’s that have already been established over a period of time.

Performance appraisal systems also provide a basis for planning improvement as well as means for determining merit increases, transfers and even dismissals. The most important purpose or goal of the appraisal is to improve performance and hence productivity in the future. Performance appraisals allow employees to see where they are at and managers can get valuable information from employees to help them make employee's jobs more productive.

As a result of appraisals, managers’ control over work and results may increase, problems can be identified early, employees are motivated by being allowed to input into and own their objectives, enhances communication, objective feedback given back to employees, facilitates decision making in regard to pay scale and promotion, centralized record of performances. Some strategic advantages of performance appraisals are that it can provide a record of performance over a period of time.

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Meaning that if you have been on the job for 5 years and the current appraisal is not up to par the employer can go back and look at past appraisals and see if it’s worth it to fix the problem to keep you or let you go. They provide an opportunity for a manager to meet and discuss performance with an employee. In larger companies an HR manager may hardly ever see the employees; by doing the performance appraisal it allows for a one on one with each employee.

Another strategic advantage is the appraisal provides the employee with feedback about their performance and how they completed their goals. Thus it also opens up the subject of how the employee could improve on the lower rated performances and provides an opportunity for an employee to discuss issues and to clarify expectations with their manager. Finally some strategic advantages could be an opportunity to think about the upcoming year and develop employee goals and can be motivational with the support of a good reward and compensation system.

Some potential forms of bias within the appraisal system could be a Personality conflict between a manager and an employee and this could cause the manager to inaccurately assess an employee's contributions to an organization. The manager could be comparing the skills and contributions of one employee to another and it could result in an unfair assessment of the employees. A manager should be assessing an employee's performance after a pre-determined amount of time. A first-impression performance appraisal isn't enough time to make an assessment.

It has the potential to be swayed either positively or negatively. A manager should never rate an employee's performance based on recent behavior rather than on past performance. If an employee has a spotless record except for a recent mistake, the manager should not forget all of the good he or she has done. The last potential form of bias with in the appraisal system is that a manager should avoid political bias. This happens when non-performance related issues cloud the judgment of a performance appraiser such as religious beliefs or lifestyle choices.

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