Managing people and performance in organisations

Group 8

Performance Review:
Performance reviews form a key component of employee evaluation. These reviews
happen typically once in six months, where the employees performance in the previous cycle
and the goals for future cycles are discussed. The feedback from the employees manager and
the team is collected, typically couple of weeks before the reviews. This requires the person to
rate the employee in various parameters that is relevant to the employees profile. The halo
effect bias plays a role here when there is a positive or negative impression of the employee.
The evaluators tend to rate the employee who has a positive impression, high in all parameters
even if he/she doesnt deserve a high rating in each parameter and vice versa. This leads to a
situation where the employees receive inaccurate feedback of their performance and hence they
are unaware of their strengths/shortcomings. The effective way to avoid this is to educate the
evaluators about this bias and to treat each of the parameter independently during evaluation.

Hiring:
During hiring, an interviewer may form a hypothesis about the candidate being
interviewed and look for a proof for that hypothesis. So, when the interviewer has a positive
perception of the candidate he/she may look for good attributes in the candidate and neglect
the weaknesses. At the same time, if the perception is negative, the interview may look only
for weaknesses to prove his/her hypothesis. This results in incorrect judgement and may portray
good candidates as incompetent in comparison to other candidates. This can be avoided by
focusing on all aspects of the candidates profile and making fact-based decisions.

Leadership:

Biases can be seen in the leadership in how leaders perceive the qualities of their
employees. While allotting the work assignment, an employee could be stereo-typed based on
employees institution or the past employment. He/she could be judged unfairly simply based
on the reputation of the college or the firm irrespective of his/her performance in their
respective environment. A gender bias can also be observed while assigning the work with
heavy responsibilities or pressure.
 The other side of the coin is when employees look at their leaders. A leader of a specific
gender, race or ethnicity could be considered as weak or strong. Also, opinion of a leader could
be judged unfairly based on his educational or family background. This can translate into not
following decisions taken by a leader of a specific ethnicity or race and simply continuing on
existing line of work.

Teamwork:

A kind of bias in a teamwork could be a Negativity Bias. For instance, during a peer
review, each member may evaluate or rate other members of the team poorly based on the
things that they have done wrong or on areas they are weak in. They may not rate others based
on the areas they are good at. They measure others performance more on the negative
parameters. This may lead to a wrong projection of the capabilities of the team. The second
kind of bias that can happen is that of a Self-Serving bias. In this a team member may take
credits if things go well or the team achieves success. But may transfer the blame on to other
team members when things go other way round stating the reason to be lack of coordination or
communication among the members or their inefficiency, etc. This may lead to an unsupportive
environment within the team.

Business Ethics:

For a market research firm, for example, the sanctity of data in the report is of utmost
importance. However, sometimes finding a data point is nearly improbable, and the relevant
data need to be carefully estimated. Lets say for a given project, a team member reported a
wrong number in the report without proper due diligence and the manager caught it.

If this is a one-off incidence he will assume that it was honest mistake and will give an
external attribution to the employees error, however, if the behaviour has been observed in the
past (i.e. high consistency) he will give an internal attribution. On the contrary, it may be a case
that organization usually resorts to such data manipulations and it is ingrained in their practice.
This is highly unethical but as there is high consensus among the employees and managers the
observed behaviour of the employee is given external attribution. In fact, people within
organization may believe that given their industry they must resort to unethical practice of data
manipulation to survive.