Performance Appraisal : The Problems

List 4 problems in conducting performance appraisal:

1.       The supervisor may tend to only recognise the recent performance of an employee, and neglect the achievement in the entire year. The recent event marks the most impressions on the appraiser; it is a very subjective and non-empirical method of evaluation. This is so called the recent effect.

2.       The performance appraisal is usually design to be evaluated and appraise annually, instead of year-around evaluation. The design of the appraisal system should be restructured so that the supervisor is able to monitor and evaluate one employee all year around, not only at the end of each year.

3.       Central tendency which lead the appraiser to rate and evaluate all the employee at the certain / same level as average performers. The appraiser tends to rate the employees at a level not too high (overrated) or too low (underrated). In public agency for example, public servants would be rated through annual performance appraisal and the best achiever would be awarded APC. To keep the quota of achiever in a seemingly normal level, the appraiser took the safe path and rates the employees as average performers.

4.       Personal bias and favouritism. The supervisor appraises and rates the subordinate based on his own feelings and opinion on the subordinate, not on the achievement and performance of the subordinate. The bias and favouritism may be caused by political issue, family background, former wrongdoings of the employee that marked the negative impressions and etc.

The performance appraisal has been an issue not only for the appraiser (supervisor), but also an issue for the employee. As the appraisal system mostly designed as one-way appraisal, the interaction between the supervisor and subordinate are extremely low. Usually, after the subordinate submit the performance appraisal form, it rarely came back to their desk to tell them how far they have achieved in a particular year. As the result, in the coming year, the employee may make the same mistakes again and never improve.