Question

Discuss employee comparison methods as they may be used in performance evaluation. Provide examples of at least two such methods. What are the advantages of using employee comparison methods to evaluate employees? What are the disadvantages?

Answer 1

Employee comparison methods are quite problematic in the sense it creates unhealthy competitions between employees sometimes though it also removes the risk of leniency error means giving extremely good feedbacks to employees or doing the opposite and central tendency error, which means giving almost average ratings to each and every employee. but still the comparisons should be done in a good way otherwise if one gets jealous of others then that is not a good sign of team-work and projects which demand peer support such comparison methods can be bad. However, paired comparison is good amongst employees because it only challenges one single employee to do better than the other in a group. Two of them keep struggling until one of them comes out as absolute winner and this method is quite useful. In performance evolution the manager plays the vital role.

advantages of it can be that if the comparisons are done in a proper way then the employees can take every mistake of them as a challege to do much better than before. The leniency error and central tendency error are two things that don't cause any biased result due to these methods of employee comparison. Which is an important thing because employees don't have to think too much about where the things go wrong and this will further motivate them to work efficiently and will also increase their confidence level. Againt central tendency it works like it doesn't allow the manager to give ratings randomly without judging properly.  

A manager is entitled to give ratings to each employees performance and if he does it well then the employees will be able to concentrate on their work better but if the manager is biased then the employees can suffer and comparison method camn lead to halo effect which can affect the fair judgements. It only judges one on the basis of their overall performance or continuous good ratings. Their actual contribution to work don't get noticed by the manager.