Here you have a group of 4 managers who meet up at a restaurant for drinks after a long day of work to discuss general information and small talk about how things are going on at the company and to speak on their managerial roles. Today’s topic of concern happens to be performance appraisal. They managers mainly talk about how they rate their employees and how they may inflate some of the ratings to get certain response out of the employees. One manager says that he only recalls about 15% of performance to actually make a decision. A wide range of topics came up on why the managers tend to boost ratings on certain employees. Some being that it could be a motivational factor to an up and coming employee, or even somebody may be going thru a tough time with personal problems so they use it as a motivational tool. Some managers give bad ratings to go ahead and get the firing process rolling, prevent being sued, or even get them out of their department. Either way, these managers used the rating system to the best interest of their employees, they fine-tuned their ratings to make sure they were accurate and efficient.
All of the comments kind of made it clear that the managers all had different understandings about the rating system. Some ratings were made to motivate most of the employees, develop employees and others were used to grade their yearly work. These managers all had different perceptions on how to grade their employees so obviously this system is seriously flawed to say the least.
I think fine-tuning becomes distortion when you have a grading system that has large gaps in what is really happening. Moving a grade up between a 6 and 7 will be ok but if you have a grading system where you have a drastic move such as a C to B or a B to A, that is drastic and fine tuning those could really cause distortion. I think this whole system needs to be