CASE STUDY

Appraising the Secretaries of Sweet water University

SUMMARY OF THE CASE:
This case study is about the newly appointed vice president, Rob Winchester and about the difficulties he faced shortly after his university career began .Rob's boss, Sweetwater's president assigned him the first task of improving the performance appraisal system used to evaluate secretarial and clerical performance. In this case, the main difficulty is the performance appraisal which was directly tied to salary increases given at the end of the year. The graphic rating forms which were used to evaluate clerical staff were not efficient as these forms never gave the true evaluation of performance. So, to change the faulty performance appraisal system two Sweetwater experts gave their recommendations to solve the problem. The first recommendation was not to use graphic rating forms as this rating method did not provide any clear picture about the good or bad performance. The second recommendation was not to force administrators to arbitrarily rate at least half their secretaries as something less than excellent. The recommendations given by the experts were good and made sense but these recommendations created problems like efficacy of any graphic rating forms if it is compared to the original forced ranking approach used by Rob and what should be the basis of performance appraisal.

ANALYSIS OF THE CASE:
The job of Rob Winchester was to completely change the performance rating system of the university because the previous system was dealing with high staff turnover ratio and also the process didn’t look just. The initial performance appraisal form was filled by administrators. Administrators had to rate their secretaries on the basis of work they have done. The problem with this form was that every administrator used to rate their secretary as excellent so as to avoid