Which of the following is a common error committed by the appraiser during a performance evaluation?

When managed and delivered effectively, performance appraisals are an excellent way to communicate with employees, set goals, review progress and motivate workers. However, a number of errors can get in the way of quality performance appraisals, and even cause negative effects on employee progress and morale. Here are some of the common mistakes in performance appraisals.

Structure and Timing

Inconsistency and uncertainty in the performance appraisal system mitigates their effectiveness. Employees should know when to expect performance reviews, and the manager should plan ahead and set an appraisal meeting on time. Scheduling and preparing for appraisal meetings helps your employees take them more seriously. Finding a quiet space to conduct the meeting and allowing the employee to share feedback or input is helpful as well.

Strictness and Leniency

Some managers offer feedback that is too strict or too lenient. Being too strict means that you downgrade employees relative to actual performance. Leniency means delivering scores higher than job performance warrants. Keeping emotions out of your evaluation and using objective criteria with data to support your reasoning helps ensure the most accurate results. Accurate ratings improve the ability of your workers to respond in areas where improvement is needed.

The Halo Effect Prevents Objective Evaluations

The halo effect means that you assume because an employee is generally "good", that his work in all areas is strong. The halo effect prevents a manager from objectively evaluating the employee on each criterion. Maintaining a professional approach to relationships, treating each worker equally and carefully scoring each criterion helps protect against haloing.

Likeness and Stereotyping

"Like me" bias and stereotyping are closely related errors in employee appraisal. These errors in performance appraisal stem from a manager's use of personal perspectives to conduct evaluations. Liking a particular employee may bias the manager toward more favorable assessments. Stereotyping employees leads to preconceived expectations and judgments, which hinder accuracy. Stereotyping also may lead to discrimination.

As with strictness and leniency, the key to protect against these errors in employee appraisal is objective and carefully scrutinized appraisals. Data-driven assessments also guard against high levels of subjectivity.

The Recency Effect

The recency effect is based on a natural inclination to give greater weight to the most recent events. Therefore, an employee who has performed much lower than normal in recent weeks may receive an overly condemning evaluation. Some employees recognize the recency effect and work hard leading up to a performance appraisal to make a positive last impression. Keeping notes between employee evaluations and tracking performance data for an extended period of time enables a more thorough employee performance evaluation.

We are all human, it is common for managers to make “errors” when assessing employee behavior and writing performance appraisal documents. 

These errors are reflective of our unconscious biases toward the employee.

These biases can give an employee an unfair advantage or disadvantage over others in their peer group.

The book, Human Resource Strategy, defines rater errors as being reflective of our imperfect judgment of others.  It is for this reason that it is important to understand these biases and take them into consideration when preparing a performance appraisal document.

According to Dreher/Dougherty, “A barrier to the accuracy and credibility of performance measures is posed by a number of rater errors, perceptual biases and other sources of distortion in performance ratings”.

So what are these rater errors?

1.  Halo and Horns Effect :

What is the horns effect and halo effect?  It is a cognitive bias that causes you to allow one trait, either good (halo) or bad (horns), to overshadow other traits, behaviors, actions, or beliefs.

This is more visible when  a rater’s overall positive or negative impression of an individual employee leads to rating him or her the same across all rating dimensions.

This is when a manager really likes or dislikes an employee and allows their personal feelings about this employee to influence their performance ratings of them.

2.  Leniency Error:

Leniency error is when a raters’ tendency is to rate all employees at the positive end of the scale (positive leniency) or at the low end of the scale (negative leniency).

This can happen when a manager over-emphasizes either positive or negative behaviors.

3.  Central Tendency Error:

Central tendency error is the raters’ tendency to avoid making “extreme” judgments of employee performance  resulting in rating all employees in the middle part of a scale.

This can happen either when a manager is not comfortable with conflict and avoids low marks to avoid dealing with behavioral issues or when a manager

4.  Recency Error:

Recency error is the rater’s tendency to allow more recent incidents (either effective or ineffective) of employee behavior to carry too much weight in evaluation of performance over an entire rating period.

This can be extreme on both ends of the spectrum.  Either an employee just finishing a major project successfully or an employee may have had a negative incident right before the performance appraisal process and it is on the forefront of the manager’s thoughts about that employee.

It is for this reason that keeping accurate records of performance throughout the year to refer back to during performance appraisal time is so important.

5.  First Impression Error

First impression error is the rater’s tendency to let their first impression of an employee’s performance carry too much weight in evaluation of performance over an entire rating period.

An example of this would be a new employee joining the organization and performing at high levels during their “honeymoon” period and then possibly losing some of that initial momentum.

The manager allows the first impression to blind him to the actual performance over time.

6.  Similar-to-me Error :

Similar-to-me error is when the rater’s tendency is biased in performance evaluation toward those employees seen as similar to the raters themselves. 

We can all relate to people who are like us but cannot let our ability to relate to someone influence our rating of their employee performance.

We all know that  human biases can easily influence the rating process, it is important to create objective measures for rating performance.  

Analyzing examples of the various effects in the workplace can help you to better understand how it can affect productivity and morale.

Observing behaviors and using available technology to help track performance can help  take some of the biases out of the rating process.

It would be really interesting if you could share your experience or if you have experienced a similar effect during your own performance reviews.

Book that was referenced in this article:  Human Resource Strategy: A Behavioral Perspective for the General Manager

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