Question

Matt, Harry and Jack are three employees within Rocket Sales Corporation that have achieved their sales targets for the current financial year. Their supervisor Peter admires Jack’s ambition and would like Matt to be more ambitious as well. Peter and Harry get along well as they are buddies. Peter conducts the performance appraisal for all three of the employees and rates Jack the highest. Then he rates Harry as next best but rates Matt the lowest as Peter thinks Matt is only focused on the client and not on achieving high sales. What are the possible performance appraisal rating errors that Peter may be doing?

Answer 1

Peter is following a narrow approach for assessing the employee performance. He is using sales performance and an employee's agressiveness to grow the sales as only criteria for determining the ranking.of employees. He has ranked Jack as first becuase he sees him working hard to ramp up the sales. He ranks Harry as second, because he sees good potential in him and expects him to focus more on sales. He ranks Matt as third becuse he does not believe that client interaction is inportant to the job. He has ignored a very important fact that cultivating relationships is more important than achieving high sales for a year and being ambitious.It is very much possible that client focus might get more results in future. Another cause for Matt's poor rating can be the interpersonal relationships between him and Harry, which could have created a bias in Peter's approach.

The promary error in appraisal methods seems to be halo effect of Jack's exceptionally agressive and ambitious approach towards sales, which overshadows flaws and shortcomings on all other counts.