Merit Rating Techniques,

Read the Merit Rating Techniques below, then ask please ask 2 people you know who have held a full-time job for more than 2 years how they are appraised or evaluated, and how they receive feedback about their performance on the job. You must find 2 people who are evaluated using a Merit Rating Technique The people you interview may not know that an MBO approach is being used to evaluate them, but after they describe it to you, you will know. how they are evaluated (in their words) and which Merit Rating Technique ( you think this sounds like.

Merritt techniques In many everyday situations we make judgments about the people with whom we come in contact. We assess them in terms of their appearance, intel- ligence, personality, sense of humor, or athletic skills. On the basis of these informal judgments, we may decide whether to like or dislike them, hire them, become friends with them, or marry them. Our judgments are sometimes faulty; a friend can become an enemy or a spouse an adversary in divorce court. Errors in judgment occur because the process is subjective and unstandardized. We do not always judge people on the basis of meaningful or relevant criteria.

The process of judgment in merit rating is con- siderably more formalized and specific because job- related criteria are established to serve as standards for comparison. Opportunity still exists for raters to impose personal prejudices on the process, but that is not the fault of the method. Merit rating is designed to yield an objective evaluation of work performance compared with established standards.

Rating Technique. Performance rating scales are the most frequently used merit rating technique. The supervisors task is to specify how or to what

degree the worker possesses each of the relevant job characteristics. To rate work quality based on observations of the workers performance, the supervisor expresses a judgment on a rating scale such as shown in Figure 51. The worker in this example has been judged to exhibit a slightly above average level of task proficiency.

Some companies rate employees on specific job duties and on broader factors such as cooperation, supervisory skills, time management, communica- tions skills, judgment and initiative, and atten- dance. In addition, many organizations compare current employee performance with their past eval- uations, asking supervisors to indicate whether employees have improved, worsened, or shown no change since the last appraisal.

Supervisors may also be asked to note any par- ticular strengths and to explain extenuating cir- cumstances that might have affected a workers performance. Some companies allow employees to add their own written comments to the evaluation form. A portion of a typical performance rating form is shown in Figure 52. Ratings are a popular way of evaluating performance for two reasons: (1) they are relatively easy to construct and (2) they attempt to reduce personal bias.

However, it is difficult to eliminate totally the influence of personal bias against the person being rated; it is still possible for a rater to make an unduly harsh evaluation or an undeserved positive one. A study of 104 officers in the U.S. Air Force showed that their ratings of the people assigned to give them briefings were influenced by whether they knew the persons in question. The factor of prior acquaintance resulted in more positive ratings of their competence (Scotter, Moustafa, Burnett, & Michael, 2007).

Ranking Technique. In the ranking technique, supervisors list their workers in order from highest to lowest or best to worst on specific characteristics and abilities and on overall job proficiency. You can see that there is a major conceptual difference between rating and ranking. In ranking, each employee is compared with all others in the work group or department. In rating, each employee is compared with his or her past performance or with a

company standard. Thus, ranking is not as direct a measure of job performance as is rating.

An advantage of the ranking technique is its simplicity. No elaborate forms or complicated instruc- tions are required. Ranking can be accomplished quickly and the technique is usually accepted by supervisors as a routine task. Supervisors are not

being asked to judge workers on factors such as initiative or cooperation, qualities they may not be competent to assess. Ranking has its limita- tions, however, when there are a large number of employees to appraise. Supervisors would have to know all the workers on their shifts quite well to make comparative judgments of their efficiency. With a work group of 50 or 100 subordinates, it becomes difficult and tedious to rank them in order of ability or merit. Another limitation is that because of its simplicity, ranking supplies less evaluative data than does rating. Worker strengths and weaknesses cannot be readily determined by ranking, and there is little feed- back or information to provide to workers about how well they are doing or how they might improve their task performance.

The ranking technique for performance appraisal also makes it difficult for supervisors to

Indicate similarities among workers. For example, in ranking ten workers, a supervisor may believe that three are equally outstanding and two are equally poor, but there is no way to indicate this. The supervisor is forced to rank the workers from highest to lowest. Thus, only one of the three out- standing workers can be at the top of the list even though all three deserve it. These limitations make the ranking technique a crude measure of perform- ance appraisal. It is usually applied only when a small number of workers are involved and when little information is desired beyond an indication of their relative standing.