Performance Appraisal Critique Essay

Performance appraisal is a process of identifying, observing, measuring and developing human performance in organizations and has attracted the attention of both academicians and practitioners. The process is also viewed as making an important contribution to effective human resource management as it is closely interlinked to organizational performance. Performance appraisal is a management tool that helps management in its drive towards optimizing performance, primarily individual performance and therefore, organization performance now and in the future. The aim of performance appraisal can be achieved through assessing how effectively employees are working in their present jobs and what they need to do and know to perform even better . Gupta defines performance appraisal as a process of assessing the performance and progress of an employee or of a group of employees on a given job and his potential for future development.

He further argues that performance appraisal consists of all formal procedures used in work organizations to evaluate personalities, contributions and potentials of employees. (Torrington et al. 2005), define performance appraisal as a system that provides a formalized process to review the performance of employees. Performance appraisal varies between organizations and covers personality, behavior or job performance and it can be measured quantitatively or qualitatively. Performance appraisal involves unstructured narrative on performance of the appraiser. Political behaviors in an organization consist of actions that are taken by individuals or group (Mintezberg, 1983). Their direction is pointed toward the goal of one’s own self-interest without focusing on regard for the humans and others in the organization.

These actions are informal and are considered a part of an organization’s culture, help to maintain interpersonal relationships. As Mayes and Allen noted, that the actions can implement a dynamic power of influence. When this influence is practiced within organizational boundaries, the behaviors are not considered political. Self-promotion and ingratiation are considered to be examples of political behavior in the workplace include .

Self-promotion actions are mostly proactive. Their purpose is to earn the attention, to build an image of oneself as a competent committed employee. Ingratiation behaviors are less proactive then self-promotion. They emphasis on “attention- giving” to a targeted person or persons relative to “attention is getting” from others. A recent study found that politically skilled employees who were involved in ingratiatory behavior toward their supervisors were not only graded positively by them, they were subsequently rewarded for doing this .

In fact, career success is typically affected by an ability to make accept others that one has the necessary skills needed to perform higher level jobs effectively (Rafaeli, Dutton, Harquail, & Mackie-lewis, 1997). Self-promotion is one important way to do this. Affective commitment refers to an emotional attachment. Employee beliefs and values regarding their job and role in the organization measure their organizational commitment (Swailes, 2012).

Affective Organizational commitment is the measure of employee’s identification with the mission and values of the organization perspectives  and supervisor. It is the commitment approach that provides a clearer and more focused scale of organizational commitment (Jaros, 1997) . In addition, recent measures of organizational commitment are attitudinal , and the build validity of affective (attitudinal) commitment is provided support . With strong supervision from their current employers the level of employee knowledge understanding and their commitment level in operations will be higher (Okpara, 2014).

Process in evaluating the performance of employees is one of the most important determinants of organizational justice . Affective organizational commitment is beneficial to the employee as well. Employees that have affective commitment at their higher levels, experience less stress levels even if they work for longer and harder hours than those not committed.

Affective commitment helps in employee’s motivation (Meyer & Allen, 1997) and low downs psychological physical, work-related stress .Employees are committed to the organization, their jobs and careers exists comfortable, and are able to spend more quality time to their families and hobbies (Reilly & Orsak, 1991). The employee’s commitment is the perception of employees procedures used to evaluate their performance is fair . Further review in the literatures indicates that fair practices in human resource management, particularly in terms of performance appraisal has a predictive role in the employees’ attitude such as the organization’s commitment .

Performance appraisal is viewed as an important mechanism for changing employees’ attitude and behaviors such as affective commitment . Moreover, a study by (Tam 1996) indicates that the commitment of government employees is higher in the federal government agencies that implement a fair and transparent assessment.In our study the psychological attachment of the employee with the organization i.e. organizational commitment .

It can be due to the comfort level with the current organization, cost and fear associated with leaving of the organization and joining the other and social disruption caused by new acquaintances in the new environment and leaving the old ones. This particular component which is the need component is known as effective commitment. It may also be due to the feeling that after joining the organization the employee is ought to be loyal and faithful to it (Bruckner 2002). This sense of obligation towards the organization is also termed as the normative commitment. The attachment of the employee can be due to some emotional reasons by which the employees identify him with the goal of the organization. This shows that the employee is affectively committed towards the organization .

There can be many antecedents of organizational commitment as suggested by  who after investigating a state owned IT industry in Malta, Europe indicated that the employees with lesser educational qualification, having a higher position in the organizational hierarchy and with lesser ambiguity in the role performed, with lower role conflict and positive impact of overall state of roles played within an organization are more committed to their organization. It increases all the normative, continuance commitment and affective components of the organizational commitment.