Employee Performance Evaluations

RUNNING HEAD : Employee Performance

Employee Performance Evaluations

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Overview

Performance evaluation is the process of evaluating the quality of an employee 's performance in a company and is usually done usually by the appraisee 's immediate supervisor (Drake , 1997 Grote , 2002 . It is a system of management necessary to improve the success of employees departments and most importantly , the company by generally helping in the identification of development and training needs , helping the employees understand how they can further improve themselves , increasing the morale of

the employees and the whole company , and by providing an avenue for communication between the company and the employees (DelPo 2007 . Performance may also serve as proof by companies in cases where they need to defend their actions (e .g . dismissal ) against accusations by employees (Mathis , et . al , 1999 . Usually , the procedure involves the filling out of a standardized evaluation form by the immediate supervisor , the peers or even the self . The evaluation form is designed to determine an employee 's standing on many different dimensions by the immediate supervisor . The results would then be discussed by the supervisor to the employee (Grote , 2002

History

Performance appraisal can be traced back over a hundred years . The earliest record of performance appraisal was in 1887 when the federal Civil Service Commission decided that a merit rating system would be beneficial for the improvement of their operations (Grote , 2002 . In 1914 , Lord and Taylor introduced the modern conception of performance appraisal which involved a scientific management method . A few companies realized that such method was an effort to a more organized system of management and allowed themselves to be influenced by Lord and Taylor . A few decades later , companies started concocting their own performance appraisal methods (Grote , 2002

But before World War II , these few included only a handful of organizations , and the military . It is also important to note that most performance evaluation prior to WWII focused more on the employee 's personalities and characteristics instead of relating their actual achievements with the companies ' goals . Analysis of the employee 's characteristics and behavior as it would relate to its effect on the company was also seldom done (Grote , 2002

It was only in 1950 when some companies recognized the importance of behavioral analysis and goal setting . This was when Peter Drucker introduced his idea of management by objective (MBO ) and when the book The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor was published (Grote 2002 . It was through the latter that the concepts of Theory X and Theory Y gained popularity among businesses . Since then , companies started to expand the process and the scope of their performance evaluations to include the development of a method that concentrated more on goal setting aside from trait assessment . The appraisal process was also not anymore limited as a responsibility of the supervisor but a responsibility of both the employee and the immediate supervisor (Grote 2002

If the prototype of performance appraisal started in the last decades of...