Custom «Performance Evaluation» Essay Paper Sample

Explain three points of concern with the given company's current evaluation form.

The three main points of concern given in the company's current evaluation form include friendliness, neatness and attitude. These points are used in making performance evaluation by the plant manager. In terms of friendliness, the plant manager gives the engineer a medium rating and gives an analysis that the engineer is a turn off to co-workers. His colleagues mock about his personality and find him unattractive to socialize with. It seems the engineer does have poor interrelationship skills that make him fairly unfriendly. The engineer has spent two years with the company but still he scores a medium rating upon his rating by the plant manager. This means that he has a cordial with a few of the employees in the company.

The engineer scores a low-medium rating for cleanliness. This clearly indicates that the engineer is less concerned about having an organized work life. The evaluation report indicates that the engineer does not arrange his desk. He applies improper filling practices by piling up documents without arranging them in any order. The plant manager had difficulties in evaluating the performance of the engineer based on attitude. The engineer had shown a spirit of hard work by completing tasks on time. However, the engineer had shown a poor attitude towards his colleagues and was not respectful to the manager.        

Define the most commonly-used sets of criteria which should be evaluated in a performance evaluation.

Quality and quantity of work done: quality of work can be defined as the continuous process of performing and sustaining good performance of tasks. The quantity of work relates to the amount of work an employee can handle in a given time period. A performance evaluation that improves and sustains the results of a company is rated higher than one which records low productivity. In a similar relationship, an evaluation which involves large volumes of tasks is less preferred to one involves smalls volume of tasks due to simplicity. However, the quantity and quality and quantity of work must be related in order for the evaluation criteria to be effective. In such a case, the performance evaluation should involve fewer tasks and result in high quality results in order to be efficient.

Time in which it is done: organizations base their performance on how faster they accomplish their tasks. A performance evaluation that takes little amount of time to be accomplished is preferable because it saves on the costs of operations. A performance evaluation that takes a long time is costly and delays decision making because it takes a long time to get the results (John & Eeckhout, 2006).

The performance's benefit to the company in terms of cost: the main objective of most companies is minimizing on costs and maximizing on benefits. Organizations conduct a cost benefit analysis on the evaluation criteria before choosing to conduct a performance evaluation. Most organizations would prefer a performance evaluation that brings in more benefits than its cost. A low cost and high benefit indicates that the performance evaluation is efficient.

Compare the relative value of the commonly-used sets of evaluation criteria identified in A1.

In A1, the commonly used sets of evaluation include friendliness, cleanliness and attitude. Evaluating employee friendliness aids the organization in identifying how to compose team of employee to complete a given project within an organization. Employees who are friendly have the tendency of having good interpersonal skills that will enable them get along with each other easily and be able to accomplish tasks as a group. A high level of unfriendliness indicates that a particular employee faces the challenge of working as a group in the organization. Friendliness is valuable to an organization because it creates the spirit of teamwork that eventually leads to improved results.

Cleanliness ensures that employees work in a comfortable working condition. A clean working environment is characterized by well arranged desks that ensure company documents such as memo and letters are easily stored and can also be retrieved easily. There will be fewer incidences of documents being destroyed as a result of poor handling. Maintaining a clean desk saves the time and space used by the worker. He will have an easy time accessing documents and arranging the documents will save on space as opposed to cluttered documents.

Evaluating an employee's attitude is valuable to the company because it helps the company in identifying the quality of work life. In most cases, worker's attitude at work relates to the level of motivation the employees get in performing tasks (Lopez, 2008). A positive attitude indicates that the employee is well motivated and likes doing his job. However, a poor attitude indicates that the employee is less or not motivated. The organization needs to identify the areas that can motivate the worker and make efforts at motivating employees with poor attitudes towards works or other employees.  

Explain the advantages of including supervisors, peers, and subordinates in the evaluation process.

Including supervisors, peers and subordinates in the evaluation process avoids the problems that may arise as a result of supervisor only assessments. The method ensures that the results of the process of evaluation are objective rather subjective. This assists the organization in identifying areas of correction and improves the overall performance. It reduces the influence of peer bias on the evaluation process (Lopez, 2008).

Explain the disadvantages of including supervisors, peers, and subordinates in the evaluation process.

The process will be time consuming and costly because information is to be collected from all the parties. The parties involves may give different scores that will affect the average result of the process. For instance a 25% rating from the supervisor on neatness and 75% from colleagues will result in a 50% rating for the employee. In addition, including supervisors, peers and subordinates in the process will limit the method of evaluation to the 360 Degree Performance Appraisal Method. Other methods of evaluation use only one or two of the parties but not all of them (John & Eeckhout, 2006).

Compare and contrast at least three common performance evaluation methods used to analyze performance data after it has been gathered.

Management by Objectives Method (MBO)

Management by objective is a performance appraisal method that rewards the employee based on the level of goal achievement regardless of how the goal has been achieved. The most important thing is the result of the goal being achieved.

360 Degree Performance Appraisal Method

The performance evaluation method involves giving confidential performance feedback to employees. The evaluation is based on variables including listening skills, behavior, characters, leadership skills and competence levels (Lopez, 2008).

Behavioral Observation Scales Method (BOS)

The above method of performance evaluation is based on the frequency of the workers performance relating to the measured factor. For instance how frequent has the employee's desk been clean. This improves the accuracy of the collected information.

F. Provide examples of at least three biases and/or errors that frequently impact the accuracy of performance evaluations.

Halo Effect: the halo effect is an example of bias whereby the employer rates an employee either on a high or low scale because he/she is also high or low in one performance evaluation area respectively. Such results of performance evaluation are too general and in most cases inaccurate (John & Eeckhout, 2006). The criteria evaluation is based on relativity of performance rather than true data. In such a case, evaluating someone lower in a certain scale is often referred to as the 'devil effect.

Leniency Bias: involves giving the employee a higher rating than the actual performance. The evaluation process or criteria is viewed as lenient because it favors some employees leaving out others. Such a bias results in inaccurate ratings and ignoring of performance improvement (Lopez, 2008).

False Attribution Errors: refers to the natural tendency of people to attribute success or failure to the ability of the individual. In such a case, the manger ignores the effect of the working system on the performance of the employee. In the real sense, the performance of an individual is a factor of both his ability and the system within which he is working. Attribution errors may not improve performance because some factors influencing performance are ignored and only human ability is considered (John & Eeckhout, 2006). 

Based upon your findings, describe appropriate tools and techniques that can be used to improve performance evaluations in the given situation.

Based on my findings, the plant manager should appraise the performance of the employee based on the overall aspects of work like behavior, performance, interpersonal skills and leadership skills in order to improve on the every aspect of the employee (John & Eeckhout, 2006). The manager should use the 360 degrees performance appraisal method to ensure the accuracy of information. The manager should also seek for professional services in appraising performance of workers to improve the process of evaluation process. The feedback on appraisal should be confidential to avoid mocking among workers.