Brendan Walsh's blog

A continued research effort around our performance review whitepaper led me back to a model we work with to describe how performance related pay fits in with performance appraisals.  The model is built from a range of standard theories - Vroom's expectancy theory, Locke's goal setting, Porter/Lawlers views on intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and others.  Diagramatically it is represented as follows

I was reading a book "Leveraging the Impact of 360 degree feedback" and was interested in the author's focus on anonymity.  For them 360 degree feedback required anonymity even to the extent that they saw a downside of narrative feedback being the potential for identifying raters.

One of our largest clients has just run 360 feedback where the raters were named.  I have not heard of any issues at all nor is it obvious that the ratings were effected by the lack of anonymity.

Performance Appraisal every day sounds slightly 'nightmarish' in concept to most people, but let's consider it in the context of effective Performance Management.

An appraisal is simply a method of assessing performance; typically this is an annual affair, sometimes with an interim review at the 6 month mark.

I hadn't thought about this for a few years - I once wrote my MBA thesis on an analysis of narrative feedback in 360 degree appraisal.  I was giving some feedback last week and I was struck by the use of different language by the different roles - supervisor, peer, self and direct reports.

So, I dug out the thesis - the dust is still settling.  Much of what the analysis demonstrated has shown itself empirically over the last few years of working in the field.