Signaling in Secret: Pay-for-Performance and the Incentive and Sorting Effects of Pay Secrecy

Key Findings: Pay secrecy adversely impacts individual task performance because it weakens the perception that an increase in performance will be accompanied by increase in pay; Pay secrecy is associated with a decrease in employee performance and retention in pay-for-performance systems, which measure performance using relative (i.e., peer-ranked) criteria rather than an absolute scale (see Figure 2 on page 5); High performing employees tend to be most sensitive to negative pay-for- performance perceptions; There are many signals embedded within HR policies and practices, which can influence employees’ perception of workplace uncertainty/inequity and impact their performance and turnover intentions; and When pay transparency is impractical, organizations may benefit from introducing partial pay openness to mitigate these effects on employee performance and retention

The Current State of Performance Appraisal Research and Practice: Concerns, Directions, and Implications

On the surface, it is not readily apparent how some performance appraisal research issues inform performance appraisal practice. Because performance appraisal is an applied topic, it is useful to periodically consider the current state of performance research and its relation to performance appraisal practice. This review examines the performance appraisal literature published in both academic and practitioner outlets between 1985 and 1990, briefly discusses the current state of performance appraisal practice, highlights the juxtaposition of research and practice, and suggests directions for further research

Performance Management: State-of-the-art and Implications for Europe and Beyond

Solutions for any headline problem need also come from global efforts, and these start from national and firm level activities, concerning which theories and management frameworks about improving performance have been developed and revised earnestly. This is a core purpose within EMR’s interested scope of publication. In this editorial, the state-of-the-art on performance management thinking is presented by introducing ten articles that explore new aspects that are core but sparse within the subject, which deal with ‘performance’ not just as an outcome but also in other interlinking ways that ultimately lead to it. Implications and suggested directions for future research to help the many challenges in Europe for the near and distant futures are finally presented

Agency theory and performance appraisal: how bad theory damages learning and contributes to bad management practice

Performance appraisal interviews remain central to how employees are scrutinised, rewarded and sometimes penalised by managers. But they are also often castigated as ineffective, or even harmful, to both individuals and organisations. Exploring this paradox, we highlight the influence of agency theory on the (mal)practice of performance appraisal. The performative nature of human resource management increasingly reflects an economic approach within which its practices are aligned with agency theory. Such theory assumes that actors are motivated mainly or only by economic self-interest. Close surveillance is required to eliminate the risk of shirking and other deviant behaviours. It is a pessimistic mind-set about people that undermines the supportive, co-operative and developmental rhetoric with which appraisal interviews are usually accompanied. Consequently, managers often practice appraisal interviews while holding onto two contradictory mind-sets, a state of Orwellian Doublethink that damages individual learning and organisational performance. We encourage researchers to adopt a more radical critique of appraisal practices that foregrounds issues of power, control and conflicted interests between actors beyond the analyses offered to date

Workplace-based assessment: effects of rater expertise

Traditional psychometric approaches towards assessment tend to focus exclusively on quantitative properties of assessment outcomes. This may limit more meaningful educational approaches towards workplace-based assessment (WBA). Cognition-based models of WBA argue that assessment outcomes are determined by cognitive processes by raters which are very similar to reasoning, judgment and decision making in professional domains such as medicine. The present study explores cognitive processes that underlie judgment and decision making by raters when observing performance in the clinical workplace. It specifically focuses on how differences in rating experience influence information processing by raters. Verbal protocol analysis was used to investigate how experienced and non-experienced raters select and use observational data to arrive at judgments and decisions about trainees’ performance in the clinical workplace. Differences between experienced and non-experienced raters were assessed with respect to time spent on information analysis and representation of trainee performance; performance scores; and information processing––using qualitative-based quantitative analysis of verbal data. Results showed expert-novice differences in time needed for representation of trainee performance, depending on complexity of the rating task. Experts paid more attention to situation-specific cues in the assessment context and they generated (significantly) more interpretations and fewer literal descriptions of observed behaviors. There were no significant differences in rating scores. Overall, our findings seemed to be consistent with other findings on expertise research, supporting theories underlying cognition-based models of assessment in the clinical workplace. Implications for WBA are discussed

Scholarly Impact: A Pluralistic Conceptualisation.

We critically assess a common approach to scholarly impact that relies almost exclusively on a single stakeholder (i.e., other academics). We argue that this approach is narrow and insufficient, and thereby threatens the credibility and long-term sustainability of the management research community. We offer a solution in the form of a broader and novel conceptual and measurement framework of scholarly impact: a pluralist perspective. It proposes actions that depart from the current win–lose and zero-sum views that lead to false trade-offs such as research versus practice, rigor versus relevance, and research versus service. Our proposed pluralist conceptualization can be instrumental in enabling business schools and other academic units to clarify their strategic direction in terms of which stakeholders they are trying to affect and why, the way future scholars are trained, and the design and implementation of faculty performance management systems. We argue that the adoption of a pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact can increase motivation for engaged scholarship and design-science research that is more conducive to actionable knowledge as opposed to exclusive career-focused advances, enhance the relevance and value of our scholarship, and thereby help to narrow the much-lamented chasm between research and practice

Item Presentaton as an Influence on Questionnaire Validity: a Field Experiment

This study was concerned with the effects of questionnaire format on convergent and discriminant validity. Two types of formats were examined: the first with items measuring the same dimensions grouped together and the second with items measuring the same dimensions distributed randomly throughout the questionnaire. Sixty subjects completed questionnaires containing items from the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (Stogdill, 1963) and the Michigan Four-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (Taylor and Bowers, 1972); there were thirty subjects in each of the conditions (grouped and random). The random relative to the grouped condition showed superior convergent and discriminant validity, as assessed by both multitrait-multimethod and analysis of variance procedures. Implications for questionnaire validity are discussed

Task dimensions as moderators of the effects of instrumental leadership: A two-sample replicated test of path-goal leadership theory

The path-goal theory of leadership has been criticized as being incapable of generating meaningful predictions and as having little empirical support; the present study addressed both criticisms. Three nonobvious predictions were generated from the theory concerning the moderating effects of 3 task dimensions on the relationship between instrumental leader behavior and subordinate satisfaction with supervision. It was hypothesized that task variety would be a positive moderator of the leadership/satisfaction relationship, whereas task feedback and opportunity to deal with others would be negative moderators. Data were collected by standard survey questionnaire measures in 2 field samples: 205 manufacturing employees (mean age 38.9 yrs) and 110 bank employees (mean age 32.7 yrs). Two of the hypotheses were supported in both samples (those concerned with variety and dealing with others), and one was supported in the manufacturer only (the feedback hypothesis). (31 ref