Human Resources Management

Executive Summary

Performance management is nothing but creating a work environment where employees can perform their duties assigned to meet the organizational goals.1 It is a technique by which the performance of an employee is measured in terms of cost, quality, time and quantity. It is also referred as employee appraisal. Employee’s behavior and organization’s performance can be influenced by good appraisal system.2 The purposes of performance appraisal are two folds 1) Administrative Purposes and 2) Developmental Purposes. Methods used for performance appraisals are: Trait Methods, Behavioral Methods and Results Methods.3 A Behavior Observation Scale (BOS) is one of the behavioral method that contains a list of desired behaviors required for the successful performance of specific jobs, which is assessed based on the frequency with which it occur. There are many jobs such as customer service representative, where employees cannot be judged or evaluated on the basis of productivity alone; this is where BOS evaluations can come into used .4

The performance appraisals can be filled up by a manager/supervisor, employee himself/herself (Self- Appraisal), a subordinate (subordinate appraisals), a peer (Peer appraisals), a team member (team appraisals), a customer (customers appraisals) and/or everybody (360 degrees appraisals).5 Performance appraisal is used in organization to decide on issues such as compensation, personnel decisions (transfers, promotion, dismissals etc.), training, and research.

Introduction

Today, as businesses are becoming more complex and competitive, organizations are looking for ways to achieve a competitive edge over other organization in every aspect of their businesses. One of the very important aspects where they are putting lots of effort is the man power. Organizations want to hire the best talent in the market and in the same time wants to insure that their employees are performing at the best of their abilities. Therefore, they can achieve their job objectives. They used performance appraisals to evaluate the job performance of an employee. According to a study6, organizations with effective performance management system outperform their competitors in the area of revenue growth, productivity, profitability and market value by 40 to 50 percent. This shows the importance of implementing good employee appraisals.

Performance Appraisal Process

For effective performance appraisal process, the management has to follow three steps. The first step is to conduct a job analysis where specific tasks and knowledge, skills and other abilities (KSAs) of a position is determined. The second step is to develop performance standards from excellent to poor in hierarchical order. The final step includes the selection of a performance appraisal method.

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