Situation: The plant manager of a mid-sized manufacturing plant needs to give a performance review to an engineer who was hired two years ago having previously worked in an aerospace industry. The engineer has worked hard and is detail oriented and has suggested changes that resulted in sizeable savings on manufacturing energy costs for the company and eliminated a significant safety hazard overlooked by the previous engineer. This will be the second annual performance review for this engineer. The plant manager is thinking about skipping the review for this particular engineer, as last year the review went poorly and the engineer became angry at its completion. The engineer thought the review was too focused on personal characteristics and relationships rather than on actual job performance. The engineer is the only trained engineer and believes there is no one qualified to give the engineer an evaluation for on the job performance. The plant manager has started the evaluation on this engineer with the current performance evaluation form of the company. The plant manager gives a medium rating for friendliness based on the engineer being standoffish and some clashing of personalities among peers, a low medium rating for neatness of workspace based on the cluttered desk, and a low medium rating for attitude based on poor attention during group meetings though the engineer does complete important tasks as needed. At this point the plant manager would like to evaluate the engineer’s performance but must give it some thought to get it accomplished.
A. Three Points of Concern.
There are three points of concern with the company’s current evaluation form. The current evaluation form does not require 360 rater evaluation to involve bosses, subordinates and peers. The manager alone has been responsible for giving all evaluations in the past and is uncomfortable with giving a second evaluation on this employee due to fear of rejection or hostility for possible negative feedback (Robbins & Judge, 2007). The peers or employees working with the engineer should be involved in this rating process, especially regarding the behaviors and traits exhibited by the engineer or ratee to give a more accurate picture of the ratees performance when involved with group effort to accomplish the performance of the job or tasks required of the ratee (SkillSoft, 2003).
The second concern for the current evaluation form of the company is it does not properly evaluate job or task performance of the ratee. This has caused the engineer to have a lack of confidence in the company’s current evaluation process. The engineer became angry and stated there was no one in the company qualified to evaluate the engineering position because the engineer was the only one with training for this position. This company is in need of the 360 evaluation form to cover all job and task positions for the company to be an effective standard of measure for evaluating employees.
The third concern with the current company evaluation form is that it is not clear on expectations for the ratee to have an action plan for correction of reasonable negative feedback and policies for fulfilling or not fulfilling action plans. This makes it difficult to gain performance improvement or job satisfaction with the company. This may cause unwanted employee turnover and lack of cohesiveness for tasks directly related to involvement with peers and subordinates (Robbins & Judge, 2007). The ratee needs confidence on an action plan that will work for improvement of baseline scores in comparison to the ratees final score. This is lacking in the current company evaluation form.
1. There are three commonly-used sets of criteria which should be evaluated in a performance evaluation, the individual tasks outcomes, behaviors, and traits. Individual task outcomes are relative to tasks required to accomplish the job description. If the ratee is a bus driver the task