Lecture 4: Performance Appraisal; Training and Developing Employees

Flashcards about performance appraisal, training, and developing employees.

Performance Appraisal

Assessment of individual performance based on predetermined organizational standards. It provides career advancement and feedback for employees, assessment of goal attainment and employment decisions and an opportunity to interact for supervisors, and assessment of productivity for the organization.

Performance Assessment (Evaluation)

Measuring an employee’s performance to make personnel decisions.

Performance Feedback (Development)

Providing information to an employee about his/her performance level with suggestions for future improvement.

Objective Performance Criteria

Quantifiable measurements of performance such as the number of units produced or sales in euros.

Subjective Performance Criteria

Involve judgments or ratings of performance.

Criterion Relevance

Is the performance criteria relevant for job success?

Criterion Contamination

Does the performance criteria contain elements that detract from the 'pure' assessment of performance?

Criterion Deficiency

Degree to which the performance criteria falls short of perfect assessment of job performance.

Criterion Usefulness

Is the performance criteria actually usable in practice?

360-degree feedback

Multiple performance evaluations from supervisors, peers, subordinates, and customers; serves as a management development tool.

Comparative Methods

Directly compare one employee’s performance with that of other employees, such as ranking, paired comparison, and forced distribution.

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS)

Use examples of good and poor behavioral incidents as substitutes for the scale anchors found in traditional rating instruments.

Halo Effects

Overall positive (or negative) performance appraisal because of one known outstanding characteristic or action.

Recency Effects

Giving greater weight to more recent performance in an appraisal.

Actor-Observer Bias

Tendency to place greater emphasis on dispositional factors and lesser emphasis on situational factors that may have affected performance.

Backlash (Gender Bias)

Occurs when individuals are perceived as violating status expectations about how their group should or should not behave.

Training

A planned effort by an organization to facilitate employees’ learning, retention, and transfer of job-related behavior.

Development

Wider and longer-term perspective to develop employees personally and/or professionally.

Social Learning Theory

Emphasizes observational learning of behavior; key process is modeling.

Cognitive Theories of Learning

Focus on how new information is stored, retrieved, and used to produce work behavior; key process is workers as information processors.

Transfer of Training

Influenced by degree of similarity between training tasks and the actual tasks performed on the job, positive affect when receiving feedback and reinforcement; effective transfer occurs when employees see the value of new work skills for improving their work.

On-the-job training

An on-site training method conducted at the actual workplace.

Job rotation

An on-site training method referring to the 'cross-training' of workers, which broadens workers’ experience

Apprenticeship

An on-site training method where workers learn on the job from a more skilled worker

Simulation techniques

An off-site training method conducted away from the actual workplace

ROI (Return on Investment)

Most common business ratio for determining training program performance, calculated as Results / Training Costs.