ERRORS OCCURRED IN PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

ERRORS OCCURRED IN PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

One of the biggest problems with performance appraisal is the fact that most people are not accurate raters of others’ performance . When an employee’s performance rating does not reflect their true or actual performance , we say a rater error has occurred . The most common rater errors are:-

• Halo / Horn Effect
• Central Tendency
• Recency
• Leniency
• Bias

ERROR DEFINITION EXAMPLE
Halo/horns effect
Inappropriate generalizations from one aspect of an individual’s
performance to all areas of that
person’s performance
Manoj’s outstanding writing ability caused his supervisor to rate him highly in unrelated areas where his performance was actually mediocre.

Central tendency
The inclination to rate people in the middle scale even when their
performance clearly warrants a
substantially higher or lower rating
Because Rahul had a concern that he would not be able to deal with confrontation during an appraisal session, he rated
all of his employees as
“Meets Expectations.”

Recency effect
The tendency of minor events that have happened recently to have more influence on the rating than major events of many months ago
Sudha kept no records of
critical incidents. When she
began writing the appraisals for her employees she discovered that she could only recall examples of either positive or negative performance for
the last two months.

Attribution bias
The tendency to attribute performance failings to factors
under the control of the individual
and performance successes to
external causes
Reema , attributes the successes of her work group to the quality of her leadership and the failings
to their bad attitudes and inherent laziness.