Hi guys, I will dedicate this post to one of the most common reasons that companies/managers provide for the existence of Performance Appraisals: “Improve the Performance of the Organization”. To accomplish this objective, I would like to start explaining how Performance Appraisals appeared in our society.
Nearly hundred years ago, two gentlemen called Frederick Winslow Taylor’s and Henry Ford, changed the gmae completely at that time. Taylor’s was the father of the scientific management and Ford the father of Ford automobiles. Both of them defended that an organization worked like a machine. Small parts connected with each other that created a bigger part. People in this case were just mere pieces of a bigger puzzle. People were just parts that needed to be controlled in order to get alignment within the bigger picture. They reduced jobs to simple, repetitive and mechanical tasks allowing them to control what people did. I just want to highlight that at that time all these made sense. We are talking about manual work, something completely different than these days.
Based on the success of this approach, it did not take long time until all these ideas were spread to many other industries such as services, education, healthcare and many others. Even in different industries, individual performance appraisals allow companies to assert control and make people accountable for their work. Around 50s, performance appraisals became a common practice that offered a nice feeling of accountability and control over employees. Tom Jenkins refers in this book Abolishing Performance Appraisals: “This process created the illusion that each part (employee) of the machine (organization) was operating (working) efficiently and effectively. If each part worked well, so would the machine.” Another and much more serious outcome was the fact that Performance Appraisals were great to hold people accountable for directives, this was done successfully connecting performance appraisals outcomes with pay raises. This would guarantee compliance from employee, as you can see from the example presented below:
Not long time ago, I heard a case of a manager who asked something to an employee. The employee, not agreeing with manager´s statement, referred that he wouldn´t do it because he thought that wasn´t a good idea. What the manager did? He put this matter on the employee targets for the semester!!! How many of you faced something like this?
After the manufacturing era, a new movement close to the 1960s emerged. This movement was called Management by Objectives which had the objective of assigning numerical targets that matched organizational needs. Naturally, people started to be measured quantitatively once per year to see how well they met their targets. This sounds like a fantastic idea for companies which thought this would be a great way to rate people in objective, fair and reliable way. This practice had its peak on the 1980s, but surprisingly the promised success that companies expected never appeared. People were highly demotivated and not happy at all with the process. People always found ways to tweak the outcome manipulating data and cheating numbers in order to achieve desired results.
Nowadays we live in a world where companies aim for environments that provide freedom rather than control. Modern companies know that, with less control and greater autonomy over employees, commitment and innate motivation will flourish. Companies start to figure out as well that organizations are systems and because of that they cannot be improved focusing on individuals. In reality, focusing on an the overall system improvement will give better results than trying to get employees to improve their individual performance.
The nature of the majority of our work is different than from the manufacturing times. This means that the type of jobs in today´s world belong to what we call Knowledgeable work. Tasks are not repetitive like in the manufacturing time, tasks are constantly changing and require a level of innovation which was before never necessary. People are required to work in a completely different way than before, yet most of the companies use outdated processes aka Performance Appraisals to rate and evaluate people. If companies wanted to survive and grow they would need to be live evolving systems where variation, differentiation and diversity are values as well as roads to innovation and improvement.
Based on everything what I mention above, I think it is clear that referring to Organizational Improvement as one of the excuses to conduct Performance Appraisals, is an idea that does not make so much sense.
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