Appraising Performance

‘Getting the best out of people’ is a crude expression of management’s key target so far as employees are concerned. In the last chapter we examined the general issue of employee motivation. Performance appraisal, the subject of this chapter, rests on the assumption that if employees’ performance is scrutinised and feedback is given, the motivation to work more effectively should increase. Problems of employee motivation where this is not done or done badly can be expressed as ‘the good people don’t know what they should be doing or how well they are doing’ and ‘nobody finds out the bad people’. In this chapter we look at ways of righting such situations using performance appraisal.