1 EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL
Employee Development and Performance Appraisal
Sherry Liezl Crowe
MGT430 A01: Training & Development
Instructor: Edgar Arnold
Argosy University
June 8, 2014
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Employee Development and Performance Appraisal
The way that performance appraisals can be used as part of employee development are: 1.
to identify what is required to perform a job (goals and responsibilities of the job), 2. To improve
the company’s productivity, 3. To work to improve the employee’s performance by naming
specific areas for improvement, developing a plan aimed at improving these areas,
supporting the employee’s efforts at improvement via feedback and
assistance, and ensuring the employee’s involvement and commitment to
improving her performance, 4. To make informed personnel decisions
regarding promotion, job changes, and termination, and 5. To assess an
employee’s performance against these goals (Reference for Business, n.d.).
There are some disadvantages to performance appraisals and they
are: if not done correctly, they can create a negative experience, they can
create a very stressful environment for everyone, performance appraisals
are very time consuming and can be overwhelming to managers with a lot
of employees, they can be a waste of time if not done correctly, and they are
based on human assessment and are subject to rater errors and biases.
Appraisals are also important to help staff members improve their
performance and as an avenue by which they can be rewarded or
recognized for a job well done. In addition, they can serve a host of other
functions, providing a launching point from which companies can clarify and
shape responsibilities in accordance with business trends, clear lines of
management-employee communication, and spur re-examinations of
potentially hoary business practices. Yet Joel Myers notes in Memphis
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Business Journal that “in many organizations, performance appraisals only
occur when management is building a case to terminate someone. It’s no
wonder that the result is a mutual dread of the performance evaluation
session—something to be avoided, if at all possible. This is no way to
manage and motivate people. Performance appraisal is supposed to be a
developmental experience for the employee and a ‘teaching moment’ for the
manager (Reference for Business, n.d.).”
Rankings are given to employees to grade them on a simple best to
worst scale to develop a quality work force. The top ranked employees are
given the best pay and incentives and the lowest ranked employees are
