Individual level performance management is the most difficult task managers have to be faced, not only to mention hardship of recognizing performance, but also how to rate employee and compensate them accordingly. When performance rate result must be used as evidence of promotion or incentive compensation plan, greatest confrontation and contradiction merging from rating process.
Under great pressure, frontline managers have to rethink about how to rate subordinate and consider things other than performance. To recognize performance is messed up with some distractors and influenced by promotion or compensation plan which lead to distorted performance system itself. Complexity of rating process makes raters take wide range of things beside performance itself into consideration. Some empirical study illustrated that actual performance accounted for only 21% of the variance, Michael Mount, Steven Scullen, and Maynard Goff published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2000. Individual level performance system build under precondition that employee‘s performance can be recognized and defined, and if the wall of premise is fallen away then the whole system is broken down.
Most detrimental and sinful way of rating process is forced distribution. Given that frontline manager recognize subordinate’ performance, the force distribution could distorted results and disappointed everyone and damaged productivity. From shareholders ‘perspective, labor cost must be tightly controlled in order to get reasonable profit, for the reason that force distribution is invented as vicious and cunning way of controlling labor cost. In performance management consulting project, we find that the most disappointed, frustrated and hated by employee of performance management system is forced distribution. Under force distribution, employee no longer care about performance itself, but pay great attention to how performance rating results could be forced distributed.
Performance management system at individual level, its conception and practice merged from early industry revolution, and since then hundred years past the system remain unchanged. How can we redefine individual performance management system at individual level that compatible with merging economic and characteristic of well-educated new labor force and change paradigm set by industry revolution? So many work have to be done in this field to find new way recognize and manage individual performance.
