Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Chapter 8 Discussion

Concept and brief description:
Rating Individual employee’s performance. One of the more difficult things to track is how efficient employees are doing their jobs. Instead of companies arranging their employees from best to worst, they can use performance measurement to see about where each employee stands on a scale, usually 1 to 5 with 5 being the best.

Emotional hook (provocative question/ claim/real-life problem):
I used to work for a company that used self-evaluation scales for measuring job performance. It was a 1 to 10 scale with 10 being the best. After filling out my first one, I was later informed that I am not allowed to give myself 10’s in any area, because 10 means perfect, and there is no such thing… I was a little shocked and offended that I wasn’t allowed to think I could do something at a level 10, or that I even had the potential to reach it. Several other employees I talked with had also gone through the same discussion about not being able to do something perfectly and we all felt kind of weird about it. Why not just set the scale 1 to 9 then?

Key points to elicit in discussion
Do you think that telling employees that they are not capable of achieving a certain level of performance is a good idea? Rating behaviors and TQM.

Facilitative questions
Does a scale system really work? If employees rate themselves, wouldn’t they score themselves higher than they actually are? What about managers who may not even know about the job, and what is considered good performance?

1 comment:

  1. I agree that a scale is very subjective. Personal evaluations and for that matter all evaluations can be very subjective. There is no way to ensure that the evaluations are purely based on merit and job performance.

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