Topics HRM: Leading teams

1. Topics HRM: Leading teams

2. Purposes of appraisal • Improving performance • Making reward decisions • Motivating staff • Developing subordinates • Identifying potential • Formal recording of unsatisfactory performance • Note: Conscious decision on which purposes to focus on for a particular appraisal interview needed for adequate preparation of interview

3. Design of appraisal interviews • Adequate communication on four levels • Factual • Relational • Appeal • Impression management • Use of meta-communication to prevent relational problems to be shifted to the factual level • Supporting reciprocal perspective taking

4. Prototypical agenda of appraisal interviews • Assess achievement of objectives • Recognize achievement of objectives • Analyze causes for (non-)achievement • Analyze personal strengths and development needs • Identify opportunities for development • Negotiate and determine new objectives

5. Appraisal criteria • Assessment of personal characteristics/ behaviors/outcomes • Recommendation: Focus on assessing behaviors, e.g. by means of behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS), and on assessing outcomes based on achievement of objectives • Potentially also compare individual performance • rank order • grouping according to a predetermined percentage per evaluation category

6. Behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS) • Each value on a scale for a particular dimension is defined by a concrete behavior Example decision making 1=avoids decisions 2=decides without adequately considering factual information 3=decides without adequately involving the persons affected by the decision 4=decides only when problems become pressing 5=decides proactively 6=decides with adequate consideration of the limits in his/her decision comptence • Frequent problem: several criteria are confounded in the anchors • Alternative approach: Assess frequencies of concrete behaviors (e.g. how often did subordinates participate in decision making, how often did reactive decision-making happen)

7. Example Novartis

8. Example Novartis

9. Example Novartis

10. Sources of information for appraisals • self-assessment • supervisors • subordinates • peers • customers • Combining all sources: 360°-feedback

11. Discrepancies between assessing oneself/others • Subordinates' assessment of their supervisors predicts supervisor's success after 7 years as accurately as assessment centers (self-assessment of supervisors has little predictive power) • Correlation between subordinates' assessments and assessments by supervisor's supervisor - no correlation with supervisor's self-assessment Source: Wirtschaftswoche 11.3.94; 900 subordinates assess the behavior of their 150 supervisors.

12. Typical errors in appraising others • Primacy/recency • Halo • Implicit theories • Stereotypes • Central tendency and positive skew • Persistence of impression despite information to the contrary • Attribution errors

13. Attribution errors • Attribution=attributing causes to behaviors • evaluating differences in behavior by comparing people, tasks, and situations in terms of causes for behavior (dimensions: e.g. internal/external causes; stable/variable causes) • Examples of attribution errors: • Fundamental attribution error: overemphasizing the actor as a cause of events • Protecting self-esteem: Underestimating person-related causes for ourselves especially for failure • Underusing consensus information: little use of information from comparisons with others` behavior • Confirming expectations: e.g. assuming person-related causes for behaviors that are atypical for a particular situation; assuming situation-related causes in highly structured situations

14. Measures to avoid rating errors • Systematic preparation of appraisal interview • Conscious reflecting of potential errors and their influence on the appraisal • Use of structured assessment scales (e.g. BARS) • Open communication climate that also allows critical feedback on the appraisal by the appraised person