The importance of identifying the evaluation errors in the performance management process

We are already familiar with the performance management process, which in one of the stages involves evaluating the performance of the organization's members. Establishing performance criteria is essential in this process, but no matter how clear the criteria is, we often face the dissatisfaction of those evaluated, who accuse the evaluator's subjectivism.

Even if the evaluator aims to be as objective as possible, as a human being he is subject to evaluation errors, in an unconscious way. Knowing these errors leads to awareness of erroneous evaluations and, consequently, to increasing the degree of objectivity in the performance evaluation process.

The halo effect involves attributing positive traits to a person, after certain characteristics with positive features have already been found.

Attribution biases refer to the attribution of success to the external, and of that of the failure of the performed actions - to the evaluated person.

The effect of recency is the tendency to give more influence to some recent minor events, to the detriment of major current events from months ago.

The central trend refers to the inclination to evaluate performance at half the scale.

The effect of similarity means that managers better evaluate individuals who resemble them attitudinally or professionally, placing them on a higher step that other individuals.

We have faced and are facing these types of errors either from the position of the evaluator or from that of the evaluator, and knowing them helps either in the objective argumentation of the evaluation disagreement, or in the objective argumentation of the evaluation.