Page 195 - DCOM102_DMGT101_PRINCIPLES_AND_PRACTICES_OF_MANAGEMENT

Unit 11: Performance Appraisal and Career Strategy

after in-depth study of the employees’ working. As negative incidents get more focused and Notes
recording such incidents demands utmost care, it is not free from defects.

Group Appraisal Method

It is an evaluation of an employee by multiple judges. The immediate supervisor of the employee
and a few others discuss the performance standards and then evaluate the performance of the
employee. The greatest advantage of this method is that it is relatively free from bias even
though it is time consuming.
Field Review Method

This type of review is conducted by the HR department by interviewing the supervisor of an
employee to understand the subordinate employee’s performance.
Normally for such type of appraisal, the appraiser, i.e., the representative of the human resource
department gets equipped with certain questions and more in the form of an informal interview,
asks those questions about the employees, whose performances are to be reviewed, to their
respective supervisors. Since this process of appraisal is an indirect method of appraising the
performance, it may not always reflect the true performance level of the subordinate employees.
Such an interview always has a sensitizing effect on the interviewee, whose responses may be
opinionated generalizations. Moreover, this method keeps the key managerial personnel always
busy in appraisals. Despite such defects, this centralized process being simple to administer,
most of the organisations prefer to have this type of appraisal for lower level employees.

11.4 Modern Methods of Performance Appraisal

The traditional methods of performance appraisal, discussed above, suffer from a major limitation
for their obvious emphasis on assessing individual performance or task, considering it as an
isolated factor. To eliminate such a narrow and partial approach, newer techniques of
performance appraisal have been developed and are widely practiced by organisations,
particularly for managerial and supervisory employees. Some of the modern techniques are
discussed in following subsections.

Management by Objectives

Management by Objectives (MBO) is a comprehensive management approach which is adopted
for performance appraisal and so also for organisational development. When MBO is used for
performance appraisal only, its primary focus is on developing objective criteria for evaluating
the performance of the individuals. Identification of common goals is jointly done by the superior
and subordinate managers of an organisation. After such identification, each individual’s major
area of responsibilities is defined. Such defined responsibility becomes the basis for evaluating
the performance of the individual employee.

Most of the organisations emphasize on developing KRA’s through the MBO exercise, as this
approach necessitates joint meeting of the supervisor and the employee to define, establish and
set goals or objectives, which the individual employees would achieve, within a prescribed time
limit (mostly it is in the form of early targets). Such an exercise also establishes ways and
methods to measure performance. Goals are mostly work related and career oriented and are
integrated with overall organisational objectives.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 187