Estudio de las condiciones de saturación en el módulo de enfriamiento

The job performance of individuals can be assessed in many ways. The most common procedures can be divided into two categories—objective performance measures and subjective judgments. Objective measures are counts of various behaviors (e.g., num-ber of days absent from work) or of the results of job behaviors (e.g., total monthly sales). Subjective measures are ratings by people who should be knowledgeable about the person’s job performance. Usually supervisors provide job performance ratings of their subordinates. Both types of measures can be useful, but studies have shown that when both are used for the same employees, they don’t always agree on the level of performance (Sundvik & Lindeman, 1998, see International Research), suggesting they likely reflect different aspects of job performance. Both objective and subjective measures will be presented in the following discussion.

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH

An important issue in performance appraisal concerns the accuracy of supervisor ratings. In this study, the researchers had available not only supervisor ratings but also data on objective performance with which to compare them.

This study was conducted in Finland in a state-owned company that provided banking and transporta-tion services. Participants were 208 supervisors who together rated the performance of 268 female sales-persons. For each salesperson, data were collected on the actual sales productivity during the prior year. In addition, each salesperson was rated by her supervi-sor on a five-point rating scale ranging from poor (1)

to very good (5). Because the nature of each mea-sure was different, each was standardized to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1. Thus a salesper-son with average productivity should have a score of zero, and her supervisor rating would also be expected to be zero. By comparing the scores for each sales-person, the researchers were able to determine if the supervisor underrated, overrated, or accurately rated the salesperson.

The results found that roughly a third of the ratings fell into each of the accuracy categories, although there were somewhat more overratings than underratings.

This should not be surprising because rating leniency

Methods for Assessing Job Performance " 87

is quite common. Supervisors had a tendency to over-rate those employees they knew best, perhaps sug-gesting there was some favoritism expressed toward those subordinates who had developed good working relationships with their supervisors. Furthermore, they found that female supervisors gave more accurate rat-ings than male supervisors.

These findings show that most ratings of perfor-mance are not accurate when compared to objective performance and that the relationship a supervisor has with a subordinate affects ratings. However, it should be kept in mind that this was a case in which performance had an objective and quantifiable

outcome—sales. In cases in which there is no such standard, we might expect accuracy to suffer even more. Furthermore, the ratings here were done solely for the purposes of the research and are likely to be more accurate than ratings done for administrative pur-poses, where subordinates might suffer consequences of less than outstanding evaluations.

Source: From “Performance Rating Accuracy: Convergence Between Supervisor Assessment and Sales Productivity,” by L. Sundvik and M. Lindeman, (1998), International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 6,9–15.

Objective Measures of Job Performance

Organizations keep track of many employee behaviors and results of behaviors. Human resource departments record the number of absences, accidents, incidents, and latenesses for each employee. Some organizations keep track of the productivity of each employee, as well. Productivity data must be collected if an organization has an incentive system that pays employees for what they produce, such as a commission or piece rate.

Five common objective measures of job performance are listed in Table 4.3. Each is an objective count of the number of behaviors or amount of work produced. Such data are usually found in organization records, but they can be collected specifically to assess performance. Two of the measures are concerned with attendance—number of times absent and number of times late for work. Accidents include both automotive and nonautomotive, such as being injured by a machine in a factory. Incidents are the number of times the individual is involved in a work incident that is considered important for the particular job. For example, in a psychiatric inpatient facility incident reports record the number of times a staff person is assaulted by a patient. For a police officer, shooting incident reports become part of the employee’s record. Productivity is the amount of work produced by an individual.

The attendance measures are applicable to the majority of jobs because most have scheduled work hours. For jobs that are unstructured in terms of work schedule (e.g., college professor), attendance is not a criterion for job performance. The other three objective measures are specific to a particular job. For example, the type of

TABLE 4.3 Examples of Objective Measures of Job Performance

Performance Measure

Absences Days absent per year

Accidents Number of accidents per year

Incidents at work (e.g., assaults) Number of incidents per year

Latenesses Days late per year

Productivity (e.g., sales) Dollar amount of sales

TABLE 4.4 Examples of Objective Productivity Measures for Several Jobs

Job Measure

Assembly-line worker Number of units produced

College professor Number of publications

Lawyer Number of cases won

Salesperson Amount of sales

Surgeon Number of operations performed

incidents recorded is a function of the nature of the job and job environment. Records of incidents of assaults by students might be kept for urban public school teachers, but they are not likely to be kept for college professors. Teachers are assaulted relatively frequently in large American cities, but college professors are rarely the target for violence. The productivity measure chosen must match the nature of the work done.

Specific productivity measures for some common jobs are listed in Table 4.4. As you can see, the nature of productivity can be very different from job to job. This makes it difficult to compare the performances of people who hold different jobs.

Using objective measures to assess job performance has several advantages. First, it can be easy to interpret the meaning of objective measures in relation to job performance criteria. For example, it is obvious that no absences in the past year is a good indicator of satisfactory attendance and that four work-related traffic accidents in the prior 6 months are an indicator of unsatisfactory driving performance. Second, the quantitative nature of objective measures makes it easy to compare the job performance of different individuals in the same job. For attendance measures, comparisons can be made of individuals across different jobs as long as they all require that the person work on a particular schedule.

Third, objective measures can be tied directly to organizational objectives, such as making a product or providing a service. Finally, objective measures can often be found in organizational records, so that special performance appraisal systems do not have to be initiated. These data often are collected and stored, frequently in computers, for reasons other than employee performance appraisal, making performance appraisal a relatively easy task to accomplish.

Unfortunately, objective performance measures also have several limitations. Many of the objective measures are not appropriate for all jobs. When jobs do not involve countable output, productivity is not a feasible measure of performance. Also, it is not always obvious what number is considered satisfactory performance. For example, how many absences per year should be considered good performance? Data taken from records can be contaminated and inaccurate. Sometimes behaviors and productivity are attributed to the wrong person or are never recorded. People can also distort records by omitting bad incidents for individuals who are being favored, and employees might fail to report accidents and injuries.

Objective measures are often deficient as indicators of job performance criteria.

They tend to focus on specific behaviors, which may be only part of the criterion, and they may ignore equally important parts (Borman, Bryant, & Dorio, 2010). Measures of productivity focus on work quantity rather than quality. Although quantity might be more important in some jobs, it is difficult to imagine a job in which quality is not also somewhat important. Finally, what is reflected in an objective measure is not necessarily

Methods for Assessing Job Performance " 89 under the control of the individual being assessed (Borman et al., 2010). Differences in the productivity of factory workers can be caused by differences in the machinery they use, and differences in the sales performance of salespeople can be caused by differences in sales territories. A person who is assaulted at work may have done nothing wrong and may have been unable to avoid the incident. A police officer who uses his or her weapon might have been forced into it by circumstances rather than poor job performance. In using objective measures to assess individuals, these other factors should be taken into account.

Subjective Measures of Job Performance

Subjective measures are the most frequently used means of assessing the job perfor-mance of employees. Most organizations require that supervisors complete perforperfor-mance appraisal rating forms on each of their subordinates annually. There are many types of rating forms that different organizations use to assess the performance of their employees.

In this section, we discuss several different types.

Graphic Rating Forms

The most popular type of subjective measure is the graphic rating form, which is used to assess individuals on several dimensions of performance. The graphic rating form focuses on characteristics or traits of the person or the person’s performance. For example, most forms ask for ratings of work quality and quantity. Many include personal traits such as appearance, attitude, dependability, and motivation.

A graphic rating form, illustrated in Table 4.2, consists of a multipoint scale and several dimensions. The scale represents a continuum of performance from low to high and usually contains from four to seven values. The scale in the table contains five scale points, ranging from “poor” to “outstanding,” with “adequate” in the middle. The form also contains several dimensions of job performance along which the employee is to be rated. This form includes attendance and work quality. To use the form, a supervisor checks off his or her rating for each of the dimensions.

Behavior-Focused Rating Forms

The graphic rating forms just discussed focus on dimensions that are trait oriented, such as dependability, or on general aspects of performance, such as attendance. The behavior-focused forms concentrate on behaviors that the person has done or could be expected to do. Behaviors are chosen to represent different levels of performance. For attendance, an example of a good behavior would be “can be counted on to be at work every day on time,” whereas a poor behavior would be “comes to work late several times per week.”

The rater’s job is to indicate which behaviors are characteristic of the person being rated.

The way in which the form is scored is dependent on the particular type of form.

There are several different types of behavior-focused rating forms. We will discuss three of them:

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (Smith & Kendall, 1963) Mixed Standard Scale (Blanz & Ghiselli, 1972)

Behavior Observation Scale (Latham & Wexley, 1977)

Organizational skills: A good constructional order of material slides smoothly from one topic to another; design of course optimizes interest; students can easily follow organizational strategy; course outline followed. syllabus but only follows it occasionally; presents the end of each lecture the material that will be lecture and not cover the intended material.

This instructor could be expected to lecture a good deal of the time about subjects other than the subject s/he is supposed to lecture on.

Figure 4.2 An example of a BARS for a college professor.From Performance Appraisal: Assessing Human Behavior at Work, by H. J. Bernardin and R. W. Beatty, 1984, Boston, MA: Kent. Reprinted with permission.

All three of these scales provide descriptions of behavior or performance rather than traits, but they differ in the way they present the descriptions and/or the responses.

The Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) is a rating scale in which the response choices are defined in behavioral terms. An example for the job of college pro-fessor is shown in Figure 4.2. This scale is designed to assess performance on the dimen-sion of Organizational Skills in the Classroom. The rater chooses the behavior that comes closest to describing the performance of the person in question. The behaviors are ordered from bottom to top on the scale along the continuum of performance effectiveness.

A BARS performance evaluation form contains several individual scales, each designed to assess an important dimension of job performance. A BARS can be used to assess the same dimensions as a graphic rating form. The major difference is that the BARS uses response choices that represent behaviors, while the graphic rating form asks for a rating of how well the person performs along the dimension in question. Thus both types of rating forms can be used to assess the same dimensions of performance for the same jobs.

Methods for Assessing Job Performance " 91 The Mixed Standard Scale (MSS) provides the rater with a list of behaviors that vary in their effectiveness. For each statement, the rater is asked to indicate if:

1. The ratee is better than the statement 2. The statement fits the ratee

3. The ratee is worse than the statement

There are several dimensions of performance in an MSS, and each dimension has several behaviors associated with it. An example of three statements that reflect perfor-mance for the dimension of Relations with Other People is shown in Table 4.5. The three statements represent good, satisfactory, and poor job performance along the dimension.

In an MSS, the statements for the various dimensions are presented in a random order.

The rater is not told the specific dimensions associated with each behavior, although the nature of the behaviors is certainly clear. The original idea of Blanz and Ghiselli (1972) was that the mixed order of presentation of the statements would make it more difficult for the raters to bias their ratings than is true of the other types of rating forms. When Dickinson and Glebocki (1990) compared responses to both the mixed and the sorted (by dimension) orders, they found that subjects responded similarly in their ratings with both orders. Thus it does not seem to matter if the dimensions are identified or if the statements are mixed up.

The Behavior Observation Scale (BOS) contains items that are based on critical incidents, making it somewhat like an MSS. A critical incident (Flanagan, 1954) is an event reflecting either effective or ineffective behavior by an employee. An example of a poor incident for a teacher would be “slapping a child who made a disrespectful comment.” With the BOS, raters are asked to indicate for each item the amount of time the employee engaged in that behavior. The developers of the scale recommend having

TABLE 4.5 Three Items for an MSS to Assess the Dimension of Relations With Other People Good Performance

Is on good terms with everyone. Can get along with people even when he or she doesn’t agree with them.

Satisfactory Performance

Gets along with most people. Only very occasionally does he or she have conflicts with others on the job, and these are likely to be minor.

Poor Performance

Has the tendency to get into unnecessary conflicts with other people.

Note: Each item is rated on the following scale: For each item on the scale, indicate if the employee is:

Better than the item As good as the item Worse than the item

Source: From “The Mixed Standard Scale: A New Rating System,” by F. Blanz and E. E. Ghiselli (1972), Personnel Psychology, 25, 185–199.

raters indicate the percentage of time the employee does each behavior by using the following percentage options:

0% to 64%

65% to 74%

75% to 84%

85% to 94%

95% to 100%

This scale is different from the MSS in that the raters indicate frequency rather than comparing employee behavior with the item. In theory, it should indicate how often employees engage in performance-relevant behavior.

Use of the frequency ratings has been criticized by Kane and Bernardin (1982).

They point out that frequency of a behavior is not a good indicator of performance because a given frequency might reflect good performance for one behavior and poor performance for another. They give as examples two behaviors for police officers. An 85% to 94% frequency of occurrence would be outstanding for obtaining arrest warrants but abysmal for being vindicated in the use of lethal force. Thus considerable judgment can be required in interpreting the meaning of frequency ratings with the BOS. Of course, judgment is required in interpreting many measures of job performance.

Development of Behavior-Focused Forms

Development of behavior-focused forms takes considerable effort from several people in an organization. Because such a form focuses on specific behaviors, it must be developed for a specific job or family of jobs. The process involves four steps and can take a long time to complete. Each of the four steps is listed in Table 4.6.

Step 1 is a job analysis that identifies the specific dimensions of performance, such as making arrests and writing reports for a police officer. Step 2 involves writing the descriptions of behaviors that vary in their effectiveness or ineffectiveness on the job.

This can be done by collecting critical incidents from people who are knowledgeable about the job in question, such as employees who do the job or their supervisors. Crit-ical incidents can provide examples that vary from extremely effective to extremely ineffective performance.

Step 3 involves having judges (knowledgeable people) sort the descriptions of behav-ior into dimensions to verify that the descriptions reflect the intended dimensions. The final step is to have judges rate the descriptions of behavior along a continuum of effec-tiveness. With a BARS, these ratings allow for the placement of the descriptions along

TABLE 4.6 Four Steps in Developing a Behavior-Focused Rating Form to Assess Job Performance

Step 1: Perform job analysis to define job dimensions

Step 2: Develop descriptions of effective and ineffective job performance from critical incidents Step 3: Have knowledgeable judges place descriptions into job dimensions

Step 4: Have knowledgeable judges rate the effectiveness of the descriptions

Methods for Assessing Job Performance " 93 the scale for each dimension, as in Figure 4.2. With an MSS, the ratings are used to place statements into the three categories of good, satisfactory, and poor.

Cognitive Processes Underlying Ratings

The development of sound performance appraisal methods requires that we understand the cognitive processes that affect rating behavior. I/O psychologists have studied these processes and have devised several models to explain ratings. Some of these models focus on how people utilize information to make judgments. Others are concerned with how people’s views of job performance influence their evaluation of an employee.

Models of the Rating Process

There have been several competing models of the cognitive processes that influence ratings of performance (e.g., DeNisi, Cafferty, & Meglino, 1984; Feldman, 1981). These models suggest that the rating process involves several steps (see Ilgen, Barnes-Farrell,

There have been several competing models of the cognitive processes that influence ratings of performance (e.g., DeNisi, Cafferty, & Meglino, 1984; Feldman, 1981). These models suggest that the rating process involves several steps (see Ilgen, Barnes-Farrell,