Interim reviews in the performance evaluation process : testing the utility of no surprises

Two major difficulties involved in traditional performance evaluation systems have been getting employees to accept honest feedback on their performance and having employees agree with the performance ratings. These difficulties have been thought to arise as a result of the performance feedback and the performance ratings coming as a surprise for the employee during the appraisal discussion. Although practitioners have frequently suggested that informal performance appraisals throughout the evaluation cycle would be beneficial for both the employee and the rater, this wisdom has never been adequately tested.

This research examined the utility of using formal informal feedback, known as interim reviews, to (a) provide feedback to employees regarding their performance, (b) assist employees in removing obstacles to improved performance, (c) allow employees to discuss performance which the rater may have missed or misinterpreted, and (d) give employees an indication of how their performance would be rated if the formal evaluation occurred on that day. It was expected that if interim reviews were effective, then that fact would be reflected in higher levels of employee agreement with the performance ratings. The study also considered the possibility that the overall performance rating would affect levels of employee agreement, as might the interaction between overall rating and interim reviews. The dependent variables for the study were agreement with the individual job responsibility ratings and agreement with the overall performance rating. The effects of the number of interim reviews, ranging from zero to two, were examined via hierarchical multiple regression analyses.

The results indicate that with respect to agreement with individual job responsibility ratings, only the number of interim reviews led to a significant increment in R² after the effect of several controlling variables had been removed from the dependent measures. Neither the overall rating nor the interaction contributed to a significant R² increment. For agreement with the overall rating, both the overall rating itself and the number of interim reviews led to a significant increment in the accounted for variance. There was not a significant interaction for either analysis between overall rating and number of interim reviews.

The results clearly indicate that the number of interim reviews are strongly related to levels of employee agreement with performance ratings.