Juxtaposition of Traditional and Modern Methods of Performance Appraisal in Organizations

Introduction

A huge paradigm shift has been seen in the world economy in the light of globalization, socio- political crises, increasing competition, downsizing manpower in order to sustain and remain successful in this ongoing changing environment. One of the important elements for ensuring more success and accelerate growth in such an environment is to improve performance and productivity of human resource. However, Bhatia (1981) has revealed that human resource has not been fully utilized by organizations. Therefore organizations are paying more attention to the performance of employees in order to compete and survive in today’s highly competitive world. One of the best ways to explore the potentials and efficiency of workers is accurate and careful assessment, evaluation and comparison of employees in terms of their productivity or performance. In other terms when managers provide accurate and unbiased assessment and feedback of employee’s performance, it further motivates workers to work harder so as to achieve the pre-set goals and objectives. To ensure the same performance appraisals serve as important tools. While focusing on the social context of appraisal system, Jenkins (2005) operationalized performance appraisal as a socio-psychological process, conditioned by a group, politics and interpersonal factors. Another researcher Murphy and Cleveland (1995) defined appraisal as a communication tool in which rater intended to communicate information about subordinates to the organization. The mentioned authors gave a model of performance appraisal which is based on assumptions such as raters behavior is goal oriented, performance appraisal involves social interaction, performance appraisals are not merely measuring instruments rather an effective tool for successful management. Other researcher Dauda (2018) defined performance appraisal as HR (Human Resource) functions and corporate practices which indicate actions and operations to measure and evaluate their employees output so to determine their pay. In this way it can be stated that performance appraisal are the human resource activities and practices used to evaluate employees input output ratio. In other words, performance appraisal is a top down assessment and a bureaucratic system run by HR department whose main function are planning, motivation, learning, development and communication (Armstrong, 2006). Thus performance appraisal process is a discrete, formal, organizationally held event, usually occurring once or twice a year in which quantitative scores are assigned to the employee’s performance against some standards used in the evaluation process and finally scores are shared with the employees being evaluated (DeNisi & Pritchard, 2006).Or in simple words, performance appraisal deals with assessment and evaluation of employee’s performance at work, which is done periodically on continues basis.