Ethical Issues in Business Management
Performance Evaluation Professionals like to be evaluated, to compete, to know how they have excelled against their peers. They want to be evaluated objectively and by people at the top of their field. Hence, heavy internal competition and frequent performance evaluation and feedback are common in outstanding organizations. But performance evaluation is one of the most difficult activities managers of professionals have to do. Performance evaluation is, as suggested by DeVries (1986): A process by which an organization measures and evaluates and individual employee’s behavior and accomplishments for a finite time period. Evaluations are typically done annually by the employee’s immediate manager. The judgments are often subsequently used to make administrative decisions (e.g., for salary or promotion) that directly affect the employee. This is a very simple definition and one that any professional employee will be very familiar with. In theory is that simple; in practical terms is a very difficult one when trying to measure performance of professional employees. Measuring can be very direct in some cases, but measuring individual’s behavior, which is a critical aspect in professional employees, can be very subjective. Sometimes there is no real way to directly tell how a particular individual is contributing to the organization. In fact many of the measurements if not well-designed can work against the objectives the organizations are trying to achieve. Shapero (1989) identifies two main dilemmas in evaluating professional activities: 1) Non-comparability of work among professionals. The work of two professionals is hard to evaluate because the problems they work with and the way they go about dealing with those problems are not strictly comparable. 2) When dealing with highly uncertain matter in which the approach