Leadership Development Exercise

Leadership Development Exercise #1

At Flat Panel, there is a lack of consistent and unbiased performance evaluation across and within divisions. While two systems exist (EES and Performance Assessment), they both present multiple issues that are likely to impact the outcome of the restructure, including:

• Availability Bias: Throughout the EES, managers are welcome to show evidence to support their employee ranking of an individual statement. Ghosh indicates that these include “a statement recording critical incidents supporting the evaluation.” Such behavior will lead to only vivid events being recorded and used to make decisions instead of a more consistent trend of the employee’s performance throughout the year.

• Anchoring Bias: The EES generates a performance profile for each employee that is based in the employee’s own mean performance level. With no standardized baseline, one employee’s most severe weakness could still be above another employee’s strength and there would be no way to determine this in the output. While employee’s profiles are not intended to be compared, it is inevitable that the team leading the restructure will.

• Recency Bias: For the Performance Assessment, Nathan Kim meets with managers once a year to discuss their employees. Such infrequent meetings create an opportunity for the report to be dramatically influenced by a recent positive, or more likely, negative event in the manager’s mind. The managers know they do not need to share the feedback with their employees, so there are no consequences to providing negative feedback if the employee has recently had an issue or project setback (which Taylor specifically mentioned was very common throughout the SPACENET division).