Performance Management Should Be Banned From Today Essay, Research Paper

Pro: Performance Appraisals should be banned from use.

I. Position Statement

In the business world today, there are many stressors that take place in the

course of a working day. Employees have things to worry about such as deadlines,

meetings, presentations, and many other problems that they face during the day.

Performance appraisals just add to this on growing stress and should be banned

from use in organizations today.

II. Identification of the Issue

The definition of a performance appraisal is the evaluation of a person?s

performance. I submit that this definition makes the process sound easy and

effortless. A performance appraisal is used for many reasons and it shows how an

employee is doing according to standards that are set by the organization.

Accurate appraisals help supervisors to fulfill their duties as evaluators and

coaches. But the major reason that performance appraisals are being used today

is because they are supposed to give employees feedback on their individual

performance on the job. This process helps supervisors and managers to determine

promotion candidates, termination candidates, and to determine employee

satisfaction and employee needs. This process is done in different ways by

different organizations. Some organizations like to do performance evaluations

once every year, and some like to do it more than that. Most companies that I

read about like to do them once every year. The managers sit down and think

about how their employee is doing, things like attitude, effort, enthusiasm,

skill, promptness, and things of this nature are just some of the criteria for

performance appraisals.

In order to have any validity this process must be well understood by the

employees of the organization and specific goals must be set for each job. These

are the basic definitions and the process that managers and supervisors must go

through in order to accomplish performance evaluations.

III. Arguments

Senior managers and employees share a common aversion to performance

appraisals. Employee evaluations was an accepted practice during the mid 1980s,

it has now ceased to be a popular way of defining and rating performance. This

argument can be seen from two points of view, the manager?s point of view, and

the employee?s point of view. Managers detest the time, and paperwork

involved. They are faced with many difficult choices, and discomfort that often

accompany the appraisal process. ?By 1993 so many people had been laid off,

and so much had been written about restructuring and the many ?good? people

who?d been displaced, that the stigma was eroding for workers and the

incentive for managers to document failure was diminished.? (Kennedy PG 2)

Layoffs were happening so often that managers and supervisors were using the

word layoff, when it really meant ?fired.? Outplacement became an antidote

to confrontation. ?Why bother to labor over a detailed record of errors

observed, assignments missed, and attitude problems when drop-kicking the

individual into the layoff pool was simpler?? (Kennedy 2) Employees that were

in fact fired felt that they had a shared fate with other co-workers rather than

thinking about a lawsuit opportunity. One manager said, ?Why fire someone when

you can lay him off, complete with a goodbye party?? (Kennedy 2)

Another reason that appraisals are becoming more obsolete is because of the

high turnover rates. Many mangers and top managers are looking for more bodies

and more employees instead of in-depth appraisals of those already in place.

Should manager?s waste

their time doing appraisals on an employee that has only been in the

organization for three months and is already looking for another job? Managers

often give employees very high scores on performance appraisals just to avoid

conflict. They do not want to deal with angry employees so to keep their

employees satisfied they give them high ratings. Besides after managers do make

their decisions they must justify their assessments face to face with their

employees, which is something that most managers do not want to do. So if

something were really wrong how would you know it anyway? ? Since 1995,

another trend has emerged to further erode the importance of the review process.

Younger workers care less about performance appraisals than older workers did,

because they are less competitive with peers, and their performance appraisal

system in place that doesn?t rank people either against an arbitrary standard

or against peers.? (Kennedy 3) In the work world and even sports today, people

are competing against their own best efforts. Athletes strive to beat their all

time best performance and businessmen and women strive to better themselves and

prepare themselves for new and better things to come. Performance appraisals are

often very one sided. When I talk about one sided I mean that managers can base

their assessments on their attitudes towards the employees, or could just use

recent examples of behavior instead of overall performance. If a manager has bad

feeling or attitude towards an employee are they going to honestly assess the

employee or put personal bias into play?

Diane Kristen raises a very interesting point in an interview conducted by

Nancy Pekala. ?Differences in interpretation are particularly evident when an

employee changes supervisors. A long-term employee may have been receiving

superlative reviews for 15 years, but then a new supervisor will score the

employee lower. Did the former supervisor score the

employee too high, is there a personality conflict between the employee and

the new supervisor, or does the new supervisor just have a different definition

of what constitutes an ?8??? (Pekala 2) For employee appraisals to be

effective managers must have constant feedback to their workers, not just at the

time of the appraisal. One employee said, ?Performance appraisals give my

manager a chance to evaluate my performance over the past year. Sometimes the

information is a surprise to me.? (McCarthy 1) This is a prime example that

employees are clueless as to how they are doing on a regular basis. How can

employees be expected to change a certain behavior if they just find out about

it at the end of the year or before they are terminated? Often at times

organizations have generic appraisals not specific ones for each position. One

manager says, ?Our appraisals aren?t relevant. They don?t address the

actual performance issues I have with my employees.? (McCarthy 2) Employees

want clarity when they are being evaluated, if they truly have the desire to

improve they want to know exactly what they need to improve upon.

Employee performance appraisals are definitely a controversial issue that

organizations face today. Managers and employees are seeking better ways to

communicate with each other, and performance appraisals just aren?t cutting

it. Many organizations still require performance appraisals and require their

manager?s to waste their time doing something that is not relevant to their

employees. So why do we have such appraisals when they don?t help the manager

to better assess his or her employees, and they don?t help the employee

understand what they have to do to improve their performance on the job?

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