Methods of Performance Evaluation

A) Relative Standards: Performance of individuals are compared  against other individuals. Major relative standards major are:

1. Individual Ranking: supervisor or rater ranks the performance of subordinates in the order of their merit, starting from the best to worst or viceversa. Each individual gets their own rank, two or more person can not get the same rank.

2. Group Order Ranking- Employees are placed, grouped or ranked in to a particular classification by the evaluator according to the selected features such as; analytical ability, cooperativeness, dependability, self expression, judgement, leadership & organizing capacity etc. Such as- for outstanding A, B= very good, C= good, D= fair, E= poor and F= hopeless or  distinction, first, second & third division.

3. Paired Comparison: Appraiser compares each employee with every other employee, one at a time. E.g.- there are 5 employyes named A B C D & E. The performance of A is first compared with B and decision is made about whose performance is better. Then A is compared with C D & E in that order. Same procedure is repeated to other employees. After the completion of comparision, the results can be tabulated and a rank is created from the number of times each person is considered to be superior.

B) Absolute Standard

1. Essay Appraisal: The appraiser describes the performance, traits, behavior and potentiality of the employee on the job in a essay form.

2. Checklist: A checklist of statements on the traits of the employees and their job is prepared in 2 columns that is ”yes” & ”no”. The supervisor tick these ”yes” & ”no” column according to their performance on given statement and forward the list to HR department where actual evaluation is done by alloting certain point to each ”yes”.

3. Forced Choice: Developed form of checklist, where two or more statement is provided to raters and raters has to identify which statement is most descriptive of the individuals being evaluated. The actual assessment is done by HR department. The main advantage of this method is that it reduces biasness because rater doesn’t know the right answer.

4. Critical Incident: This approach focuses on certain critical behavior of an employee that makes all the differences between effective and non effective  performance on the job. Supervisor directly observes & records examples of behavior under the categories that indicate effective or ineffective performance frequently through out the year. This procedure can provide a sound  basis for feedback to the individual so it is useful for devlopmental purpose. The danger is taht it may give the  employees the impression that everything they do will be recorded which may harass them.

5. Graphic Rating Scale: This system consists of several numerical scales each representing a job related performance criteria such as- dependability, initiative, output, attendence, attitude, cooperation etc. Each scale ranges from excellent to poor. The rater checks the appropriate performance level on each criteria and computes the employees total numerical score.

6. Behaviourally anchored rating scales (BARS)