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Issue: Performance Reviews
Performance Reviews
By: Holly Rosenkrantz
Pub. Date: March 11, 2019
Access Date: January 25, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/237455680508.n1
Source URL: http://businessresearcher.sagepub.com/sbr-2022-109219-2918905/20190311/performance-reviews
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Are they still an effective management tool?
Executive Summary
The annual performance review, which has been part of the American workplace for almost a century, is evolving in the digital age. While
some high-profile corporations such as Adobe, Deloitte and GE have garnered attention for announcing they will no longer use yearly
reviews to evaluate employees, the practice remains intact at most mid- and large-sized companies. Performance reviews remain popular
because they are widely considered an effective tool for determining promotions, salaries and bonuses – and also for encouraging
underperforming workers to improve and shedding those who do not. Because these reviews can improve performance by requiring
managers to communicate their expectations and goals, many companies now do evaluations more than once a year and have added
elements such as informal conversations – sometimes called check-ins – to the process.
Key takeaways include:
Performance reviews entered the business world after they were already a standard practice in the U.S. military, but have changed
with the times, reflecting popular cultural trends and the latest theories of human behavior.
In recent years, many companies, including GE and Microsoft, have stopped using forced rankings, a once-popular system in which
managers have no choice but to give a pre-determined number of workers the lowest ratings.
Internet-based companies such as Facebook and Warby Parker have modernized the review process so that the reasons for pay
raises are clearer, managers do not discriminate against women and the approach is less top-down.
Full Report
Warby Parker and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal have introduced informal elements to the review process, including asking
employees to rate their happiness on the job. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Lucky Magazine)
Dick Grote will never forget his first performance review.
Grote was a young industrial engineer at General Electric, and he met with his boss in a one-on-one meeting that typically corresponded
with the annual appraisal. Grote – now a management consultant – can recall the meeting so easily that one might think it occurred last
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Performance Reviews
SAGE Business Researcher
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
week, not half a century ago. He still has his copy of the report that his boss handed him; sometimes he carries it in his coat pocket and
shows it to people.
Back then, GE was known for its rigorous performance evaluation system. Grote thought he was doing well – until his boss turned their
meeting into something of a dumpster fire.
“It was devastatingly bad,” Grote says. “I was not doing a good job, and here was my boss telling me I wasn’t doing a very good job.” What
made the review particularly painful was his boss’s answer to the final question on the appraisal. All GE reviews ended with “Would you
hire this person today?” and a box for Yes or No – and Grote’s boss had checked No. “I was very embarrassed,” Grote says. “I wanted to
dig a hole and bury myself in it.”
But Grote credits the negative review with forcing him to shape up and meet GE’s expectations. He says he immediately upped his game
and remained with the company for five years, until United Airlines recruited him. Today, Grote advises businesses on how to get the most
out of their employees, and he is an evangelist for regular appraisals.
“Performance reviews are an ethical obligation of leadership,” he says. “Every person who works for an organization deserves to know the
answer to the question, ‘How am I doing?’ ”
Performance reviews have been a staple of U.S. business culture for nearly a century, but they are a fraught practice. Managers and
employees both tend to dread the ritual. And in today’s workplace, many employers consider the traditional appraisals old-fashioned and
one-dimensional. 1 It is no surprise that several high-profile companies in recent years have gone out of their way to make it known that
they have dropped yearly performance evaluations (“In Big Move, Accenture Will Get Rid of Annual Performance Reviews and Rankings”
read one typical headline). 2 Other businesses have been reassessing their continued use.
Yet performance evaluations remain in force at the majority of mid- and large-sized U.S. companies because reviews have evolved with
the times and, as Martin Conyon, a management professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts, points out, they are still considered the
best method for determining whether someone gets a raise, gets promoted or gets fired.
Worker Quits on the Rise
Annual number of employee quits, in millions, 2010-18
Note: Number for 2018 is an estimate.
Source: Roy Maurer, “Why Are Workers Quitting Their Jobs in Record Numbers?” Society for Human Resource Management, Dec. 12, 2018,
https://tinyurl.com/y42srkpn
The number of employees in the United States who have voluntarily left their jobs has risen every year since
2010.
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Performance Reviews
SAGE Business Researcher©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. At a time when research shows that company loyalty is at historic lows, many executives say performance reviews can help create a strong workforce while also setting up a system for rewarding and retaining stellar employees. 3 Reviews also establish a documented history of how someone has performed at a company, something that lawyers and HR experts say can become crucial evidence in legal disputes. And at companies where reviews have disappeared or gone out of regular use, it is often the employees who clamor for reinstating them because they want managers to give them direct feedback on how they are doing, something that often only comes with a formalized process. 4 “Properly designed, performance reviews are good for companies and good for employees,” Conyon says. “If you think about this as a talent management system, how else are you going to do this?” The use of performance evaluations in large-scale organizations began a century ago in the U.S. military. 5 During World War I, the military began a “merit system” to weed out subpar soldiers and transfer or discharge them. Later, in the run-up to World War II, the military introduced a ranking system to figure out which soldiers could be moved into leadership positions. 6 Guiding these evaluation systems was the principle that the men who possessed good soldiering and leadership qualities were born that way. In other words, someone either had it or didn’t. 7 With the end of World War II, the practice of rating and ranking soldiers migrated to the world of business, as did many of the former military leaders who had been conducting them. About 60 percent of all U.S. companies were using annual performance reviews at that time, a number that swelled to 90 percent by the 1960s. 8 These companies, like the military, used the yearly evaluations, and the process of rating employees’ strengths and weaknesses on something like a 1-5 scale, for informational purposes. Companies were not so much focused on improving an employee’s on-the-job performance as on determining the composition of the company’s workforce – the weak links, the average players and the best and brightest. Companies would, in turn, use this information to shed those they considered liabilities and reward the higher-performing workers with pay raises and promotions. 9 Using performance rankings to terminate swaths of underperforming employees did not come into play until the 1980s. General Electric CEO Jack Welch brought attention to this no-holds-barred approach, and he adhered to a survival-of-the-fittest view of labor management that relied on a system formally known as the “vitality curve,” but more often called “rank and yank” or the forced ranking system. 10 The idea was that the company should be in a continuous quest to attract, hire and retain the highest performers, and that such a quest – a “war for talent,” as the consulting firm McKinsey famously dubbed it – would lead to a stronger company year after year. 11 Although GE was one of many corporations to use this subset of the traditional annual review, Welch, who served as CEO from 1981 to 2001, helped associate his company with it. 12 Under the forced ranking system, employees are evaluated annually, managers give subordinates a numerical rating and each worker is ultimately placed along a continuum, from best to worst. The result is a bell curve, and the star employees get salary increases while the underachievers – 10 percent in GE’s case – are shown the door. 13 “There is no sugarcoating this,” Welch wrote in 2005 in his book “Winning.” “They have to go.” 14 Watch video with professor Loizos Heracleous on Jack Welch’s approach to personnel management: As it turns out, the forced ranking method of review became popular because of a problem that arose with the onset of annual performance appraisals, one that still exists today. When managers rate employees, they are often reluctant to give workers below- average ratings and instead rate most as average and a handful above average. 15 By forcing supervisors to stack employees against each other according to a quota system (typically 10 percent at the bottom, 70 percent in the middle and 20 percent at the top), the forced ranking system left managers with no choice but to identify a company’s supposed deadwood. Technical Changes A substantial shift in management philosophy occurred in the 1990s that eroded trust in annual performance reviews, ultimately leading a number of companies to abandon them. While the traditional review, including the rank-and-yank version, seemed to have a home in the cutthroat era of the 1980s, these appraisals were less suited to the values and priorities that animated businesses during the 1990s dot- com boom. Page 4 of 11 Performance Reviews SAGE Business Researcher
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. For one, teamwork is the lifeblood of many tech companies, and performance reviews – especially forced ranking reviews that rate employees against each other – do not encourage collaboration. This conflict was made vivid with Microsoft, which had trouble innovating in the 1990s and 2000s and lost ground to tech rivals such as Apple and Facebook. 16 Forced rankings were a centerpiece of the management system at Microsoft, and former employees contend that the ranking system made the Microsoft workplace toxic and kept the company from developing new technologies. As a result, the critics say, the company was always playing catch-up while others introduced the world to revolutionary products and services including the iPhone, the iPad and Google. 17 “As a software developer and later development lead at Microsoft between 1998–2003, I had to evaluate others and be evaluated myself under this system,” David Auerbach, a former Microsoft manager, wrote in Slate. “And I can say that yes, stack ranking is as toxic for innovation and integrity and morale as media reports made it out to be, and then some.” 18 Explaining how the review system at Microsoft created a savage atmosphere and made the company’s deep talent pool so ineffective, one unidentified software developer told Vanity Fair: “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.… It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” 19 The reviews were used to give raises and bonuses to the top performers while the underperformers were penalized or fired. Reports of sabotage and finger-pointing at Microsoft were rampant. The “Lord of the Flies” environment encouraged employees to spend time trying to game the system by either devoting hours to sucking up to the boss or moving from one department to another. For instance, an engineer might push to move to a team with underperforming workers just to increase the chances of securing a good review. 20 “It’s the single worst thing I’ve seen in my career,” a Microsoft executive, who declined to be identified, told the New York Times, speaking about stacked ranking. 21 In 2013, Microsoft abandoned forced rankings. In an email explaining the move, Lisa Brummel, the head of human resources, conceded that the system needed changing. She wrote that there would be “no more ratings” and “no more curve.” Instead, she promised Microsoft would now put “more emphasis on teamwork and collaboration” and “more emphasis on employee growth and development.” 22 Another management principle that began to take hold was that talent should be cultivated, not simply discovered, hired and promoted. That is, there was value in helping workers improve. The growth of this view in the 1990s was, in part, out of necessity: It was a time of low unemployment, and companies, especially those in the tech industry, were finding it hard to hire and retain employees. 23 Jobs were also becoming more fluid and complex. Rather than just dropping employees into the professional waters and seeing if they sank or swam, companies began strengthening training and development. 24 Performance reviews were largely out of sync with this more nurturing approach because they were often backward-looking and centered on holding people accountable for past performance as opposed to uncovering diamonds in the rough. 25 Management specialists such as Dick Grote started advocating for reviews that were more future-oriented and could help workers improve at their jobs. 26 Specialists were also losing faith in the notion that past performance predicts future performance. A widely regarded examination of performance reviews helped put to rest the idea that an employee’s performance was fixed from year to year. Two leading management experts, Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Conyon of Bentley University, pored over pages of performance reviews that were conducted at a major U.S. corporation between 2001 and 2007 and found that workers were not nearly as consistent over time as business leaders once thought. 27 “There was little evidence that good performers in one year would be good performers the following year,” wrote Cappelli and Conyon. “There is no support for the simple idea that the workforce is made up of good performers who tend always to be good (A players), poor performers who tend always to be bad (C players), and another group always stuck in the middle (B players).” 28 Employers Split on Ratings Attitudes of human resource managers on performance ratings Page 5 of 11 Performance Reviews SAGE Business Researcher
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source: “The Real Impact of Eliminating Performance Ratings,” CEB, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y3kz4tym
About half of human resource managers said they did not plan to get rid of employee performance ratings,
according to a 2016 survey.
Even though performance reviews continued to evolve to meet the latest understanding of human behavior, a backlash against them
started a few years ago. Software giant Adobe led the charge when, in 2012, it announced that it was completely revamping its approach
to employee evaluations. Business publications have treated that move as a watershed event, highlighting how significant it was for a
corporation of Adobe’s size and influence to throw the standard review system aside. 29 Other companies soon made similar
pronouncements. And for the first time in a long time, a raft of businesses began using new appraisal mechanisms or were trying to
drastically modify the traditional review process.
Out With the Old, In With the Old
After Adobe jettisoned the annual performance review system, it put in place an informal “check-in” process. As explained on the
company’s website, these one-on-one meetings, held frequently between employees and supervisors throughout the year, are supposed
to set expectations and include feedback and criticism. 30 The process helps determine pay raises and promotions, and while the new
system includes paperwork for managers, it does not require them to fill out lengthy, detailed forms. More significantly, numerical ratings
and rankings have been completely scrapped.
Yet some do not see the changes at Adobe and other companies as such a seismic shift. That is the perspective of Brian Kropp, the
human resources expert at Gartner Group, a Connecticut-based research and advisory company. “When you actually take it apart and look
at what they’ve done, it’s really a performance review,” Kropp says, referring to the companies that have changed their procedures. “They
may call it something different, but what you see is a piece of paper that a manager uses to have a conversation, with rankings from
outstanding to poor.”
Kropp points out that the vast majority of companies are still conducting standard performance reviews, while some have modified them to
make them less traditional and more frequent.
Even so, some businesses have run into roadblocks as they have tried to modify the traditional appraisal
process. At Facebook, when executives were considering eliminating the performance review, they
discovered something unexpected: Employees wanted to keep the ratings. “We conducted focus groups
and a follow-up survey with more than 300 people,” explained the Facebook executives who were
overseeing the change. “The feedback was clear: 87% of people wanted to keep performance ratings.” 31
Facebook ultimately made a few changes while keeping the traditional structure in place. It added peer
reviews to the process, but still had managers write reviews. A team now analyzes the written reports to
look for red flags, such as a manager who could be biased against women by repeatedly calling them
“abrasive.” And, to reduce confusion, the company created a formula that directly links ratings to pay
increases. 32
To make sure the performance appraisal system was not just about carrots and sticks but also about
growth and improvement, Facebook invested in coaching and professional development and added goal-
setting to the process, with rewards for meeting those goals. 33
Brian Kropp Facebook is not the only company where employees have thrown their support behind performance
reviews. In 2016, after being in business for 10 years, Quizlet, the educational training company, began
conducting employee performance reviews for the first time. The company’s employees triggered the
34
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change after Quizlet raised $12 million from investors and more than tripled its staff from 15 to 50 workers. 34 Employees who had been
there before the hiring spree asked management to start conducting regular reviews so they could gain insight into their future at the
company.
In a 2017 interview with Fast Company, Aisha Stephenson, Quizlet’s vice
president of people operations, said it was “pretty shocking for me to hear
that people were asking for a formal performance management process” and
“wanted to make sure that their progress and growth in their roles was
documented.” 35
One advantage of conducting regular performance reviews is that the process
is on the record and documented. This paper trail can act as a buffer against
litigation and digital retribution by disgruntled employees, and that is why
human resource managers say they are necessary. 36 Reviews can be useful
for companies if they terminate or demote employees or if they are charged
with discrimination.
For example, a federal court ruled in favor of Dow Chemical after a Muslim
employee sued the company for discrimination. Dow denied the allegation,
contending that the company had fired the scientist for poor performance. The court based its decision partly on copies of the employee’s
reviews, which showed he had received low ratings. 37
In a 2016 report on employee evaluations for the Society for Human Resource Management, a professional association for HR
specialists, Jeffrey Horton Thomas, an employment lawyer, said that performance reviews often become crucial in employment disputes.
He added that without the reviews, employers may have a difficult time defending themselves. 38
As important as documentation is, companies are increasingly adding less formal communication routines to the performance review
process. According to Kropp, the human resources expert, this type of communication is being introduced in part to cater to Millennials
who are used to chatting by text and messaging on social media.
One company that follows this approach is Warby Parker, the eyeglasses retailer. It conducts traditional performance reviews twice a year,
but also asks employees to report how happy they have been on the job at the end of every week on a scale from zero to 10. The reason
for these happiness reports is to give the company a frequent picture of how its workers are doing, but it is also a vehicle for spurring
impromptu conversations between workers and supervisors, making feedback a regular and ongoing practice. 39
40
“I joke that feedback is a gift,” Warby Parker co-CEO Neil Blumenthal has said. “It’s the opposite of revenge – it’s best served hot.”
About the Author
Holly Rosenkrantz is a Washington-based freelance journalist who writes about politics, business and health care. She is a former White
House correspondent and Wall Street reporter and has worked for CBS News, Bloomberg News and Reuters. She previously reported for
Business Researcher on the recycling industry.
Chronology
Early 1900s The military pioneers reviews.
World War I The U.S. military starts using a merit system to weed out incompetent service personnel.
Late 1920s Industrial psychologist Elton Mayo studies workers at a plant outside Chicago and finds people perform better when
they think management is paying attention to their productivity.
World War II The U.S. Army creates a ranking system to find the soldiers best suited for leadership positions.
Mid 1900s Use of reviews and ratings spreads.
1950 Congress passes the Performance Rating Act requiring the use of evaluations, including ratings, to identify the most
and least productive federal employees.
1960 In the seminal book, “The Human Side of Enterprise,” management professor Douglas McGregor introduces a novel
pair of theories on how supervisors can motivate workers through evaluations and goal setting.
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1970s Aubrey Daniels, a clinical psychologist, coins the term “performance management” and becomes a popular author and
expert known for applying behavioral science research to the workplace.
Late 1900s “Rank and yank” takes off.
1981 Jack Welch, a proponent of the so-called “rank and yank” annual review, becomes CEO of General Electric.
1997 The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. releases the “War for Talent,” a study arguing that star performers are in limited
supply and a company’s success hinges on finding and retaining them.
1999 Performance ranking enters popular culture with the launch of RateMyProfessors.com, which quickly becomes a top
resource for college students, inspiring similar websites for reviewing lawyers, doctors and other professionals.
2000s-Present Reviews generate second thoughts.
2001 Ford settles two class action lawsuits for $10.5 million after fired workers allege the automaker manipulated its forced
ranking system to get rid of older employees.
2009 “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility,” a PowerPoint deck articulating how to assess worker performance,
including a critique of forced ranking, is released online and goes viral, ultimately garnering more than 18 million views.
2012 Adobe announces it will stop conducting annual performance reviews and will replace them with frequent “check-ins.”
Resources for Further Study
Bibliography
Books
Culbert, Samuel A., “Get Rid of the Performance Review!” Business Plus, 2010. A business school professor argues that the traditional
performance evaluation has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with a system that focuses on coaching and improvement.
Hsieh, Tony, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” Grand Central Publishing, 2010. In this best-selling book,
the CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos makes the case that companies looking to succeed today must invest in workers’ happiness.
Kahneman, Daniel, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. A winner of the Nobel Prize in economics discusses his
research, including the study of rating systems, to explain how bias affects assessments and how to make better choices in and out of the
workplace.
Michaels, Ed, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod, “The War for Talent,” Harvard Business Press, 2001. The authors of a headline-
grabbing McKinsey study explain how companies must relentlessly pursue, retain and develop the most effective leaders to remain
competitive.
Articles
Beard, Alison, and Dan McGinn, “Performance Reviews,” Harvard Business Review, June 29, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y32nr45y. Adam
Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, discusses the power of performance evaluations
and how employees can make the most of them.
Dishman, Lydia, “The complicated and troubled history of the annual performance review,” Fast Company, Nov. 7, 2018,
https://tinyurl.com/y4gnshqf. A journalist looks at the growth of performance reviews and why they are controversial.
Eichenwald, Kurt, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair, August 2012, https://tinyurl.com/y9m42gdh. In an influential magazine piece, a
journalist explores how Microsoft’s competitive troubles stemmed from its performance review process.
Welch, Jack, “‘Rank and Yank’? That’s not how it’s done,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/y3zlxvny. The former
GE chief executive defends the use of numerical ratings as an ethical way to identify failing employees and improve a company’s overall
success.
Reports and Studies
“The Real Impact of Eliminating Performance Ratings: Insights from Employees and Managers,” CEB, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y3em5jgz.
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SAGE Business Researcher©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. A study by the technology company CEB reveals that workers find performance appraisals with ratings more productive, and that managers are less likely to help employees improve when ratings are dropped. Cappelli, Peter, and Martin Conyon, “What Do Performance Appraisals Do?” National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y53pyu5s. A deep analysis of performance reviews by two University of Pennsylvania scholars finds that an employee’s annual appraisal scores vary over time and are influenced by a variety of factors, such as merit pay and promotions. Culbertson, Satoris S., Jaime B. Henning and Stephanie C. Payne, “Performance appraisal satisfaction: the role of feedback and goal orientation,” Journal of Personnel Psychology, January 2013, https://tinyurl.com/yyr5epoy. Research by three professors shows that employees have bad reactions to negative feedback – even those who say they want to hear how they can improve. Fishbach, Ayelet, Tal Eyal and Stacey R. Finkelstein, “How Positive and Negative Feedback Motivate Goal Pursuit,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/pt5ftod. According to an analysis of workers’ response to criticism, new hires want only praise from supervisors, but employees who have been at a company longer expect some negative feedback. The Next Step Companies Burkus, David, “How Adobe Structures Feedback Conversations,” Harvard Business Review, July 20, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yyoesly8. Computer software company Adobe uses informal check-ins to discuss an employee’s objectives, offer coaching on how to meet the goals and plan for future development. Rissell, Matt, “Performance Reviews Suck, Here’s What We Do Instead,” Forbes, May 26, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y5hc2rmc. The CEO of a mobile time-tracking company eliminated annual performance reviews in favor of frequent one-on-ones with employees. Staley, Oliver, “A kinder, gentler Microsoft is replacing feedback with ‘perspectives,’” Quartz, Sept. 10, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y494xjr2. Tech giant Microsoft’s new feedback system aims to encourage more supportive conversations with managers and be less intimidating to employees. Innovation BasuMallick, Chiradeep, “4 Steps to Modernizing Performance Management, the People-first Way,” HR Technologist, March 28, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y5sxgb5w. Managers can improve performance management by shifting from formal annual reviews to more frequent chats with employees, among other tactics, says a marketing writer. McGregor, Jena, “Everything you know about giving feedback at work could be wrong,” The Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y67knvqg. Managers need to stop giving personal feedback or advice to employees and instead focus on relaying the facts about and reactions to an employee’s performance, says a management expert and author. Rascoff, Spencer, “How to Upgrade Your Company’s Performance Reviews,” Inc., Feb. 19, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y6l36fdy. Online real estate database Zillow evaluates employees’ adherence to the company’s core values in tandem with job performance to encourage personal growth and teamwork, says the CEO. Organizations Association for Talent Development 1640 King St., Alexandria, VA 22314 1-800-628-2783 www.td.org A membership organization that supports professionals who seek to improve worker performance, skills and knowledge. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2 Massachusetts Ave., N.E., Washington, DC 20212-0001 1-202-691-6573 www.bls.gov An arm of the U.S. Department of Labor that collects, analyzes and distributes comprehensive information on workers, the workplace and the economy, including the monthly jobs report. National Association of Personnel Services 78 Dawson Village Way, Suite 410-201, Dawsonville, GA 30534 Page 9 of 11 Performance Reviews SAGE Business Researcher
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1-844-627-7360 www.naps360.org A lobbying group for staffing professionals that provides education and standards of practice for members. National Bureau of Economic Research 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 1-617-868-3900 www.nber.org A private, nonprofit organization that publishes studies, reports and data for businesses, lawmakers, universities and the media. Office of Personnel Management 1900 E St., N.W., Washington, DC 20415 1-202-606-1800 www.opm.gov The U.S. government agency responsible for helping federal departments hire, supervise and retain public employees. It provides guidance on administering performance management programs and complying with labor regulations. Society for Human Resource Management 1800 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314 1-800-283-7476 www.shrm.org The largest organization of human resource professionals, providing research and training for about 300,000 members and lobbying lawmakers. Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology 440 E. Poe Road, Suite 101, Bowling Green, OH 43402 1-419-353-0032 www.siop.org A group working to advance the field of industrial and organization psychology and improve worker performance and satisfaction through conferences and research. Notes [1] Vauhini Vara, “The Push Against Performance Reviews,” The New Yorker, July 24, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y5gexgfv. [2] Lillian Cunningham, “In Big Move, Accenture Will Get Rid of Annual Performance Reviews and Rankings,” The Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y5wwxxn5. [3] “The high costs of staff turnover,” The Economist, Sept. 20, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y6bpydpg. [4] Lori Goler, Janelle Gale and Adam Grant, “Let’s Not Kill Performance Evaluations Yet,” Harvard Business Review, November 2016, https://tinyurl.com/yxmodpdw. [5] Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, “The Performance Management Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016, https://tinyurl.com/z5hfrm3. [6] Lydia Dishman, “The complicated and troubled history of the annual performance review,” Fast Company, Nov. 7, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y4gnshqf. [7] Cappelli and Tavis, op. cit. [8] Goler, Gale and Grant, op. cit. [9] Cappelli and Tavis, op. cit. [10] Max Nisen, “Why GE had to kill its annual performance reviews after more than three decades,” Quartz, Aug. 13, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y2km2td9. [11] “The War for Talent,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 1998, https://tinyurl.com/y4qts82w. [12] Elizabeth G. Olson, “Microsoft, GE, and the futility of ranking employees,” Fortune, Nov. 18, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/m6yvfmd. [13] Nisen, op. cit. Page 10 of 11 Performance Reviews SAGE Business Researcher
©2022 SAGE Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. [14] “Should I Rank My Employees?” The Wall Street Journal, accessed March 4, 2019, http://tinyurl.com/mxby277. [15] Cappelli and Tavis, op. cit. [16] Olson, op. cit. [17] Kurt Eichenwald, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair, August 2012, https://tinyurl.com/y9m42gdh. [18] David Auerbach, “Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager,” Slate, Aug. 26, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/yxbrz8cl. [19] Eichenwald, op. cit. [20] Nick Wingfield, “Microsoft Abolishes Employee Evaluation System,” The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/y54wxrdg. [21] Ibid. [22] Janet I. Tu, “Microsoft gets rid of stack-ranking review system,” The Seattle Times, Nov. 12, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/pa26zcr. [23] Peter Cappelli, “Talent Management for the Twenty-First Century,” Harvard Business Review, March 2008, https://tinyurl.com/gwwscvc. [24] Ibid. [25] Rebecca Greenfield, “Your Raise Is Now Based on Next Year’s Performance,” Bloomberg News, July 9, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yxl7bzbt. [26] Cappelli and Tavis, op. cit. [27] Peter Cappelli and Martin Conyon, “Performance reviews don’t work the way we think they do,” Marketwatch, July 8, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/huyokbs. [28] Ibid. [29] Cappelli and Tavis, op. cit. [30] “Just checking in: The dreaded performance review? Not at Adobe,” Adobe Life Magazine Careers, accessed Feb. 19, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yynakvpj. [31] Goler, Gale and Grant, op. cit. [32] Ibid. [33] Ibid. [34] Pavithra Mohan, “Ready To Scrap Your Annual Performance Reviews? Try These Alternatives,” Fast Company, April 13, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y2neg63y. [35] Ibid. [36] Toni Vranjes “Reduce the Legal Risks of Performance Reviews,” Society for Human Resource Management, Feb. 19, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y8f9et2u. [37] Jennifer L. Gokenbach, “Poor Performance Defeats Muslim Employee’s Discrimination Claims,” Society for Human Resource Management, May 10, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yy64sot5. [38] Vranjes, op. cit. [39] Mohan, op. cit. [40] Ibid. Page 11 of 11 Performance Reviews SAGE Business Researcher
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