Judgement Error

Judgment Errors

People commit mistakes while evaluating people and their performance. Biases and judgment errors of various kinds may spoil the show. Bias here refers to inaccurate distortion of a measurement. These are:

(i) First impressions (primacy effect): The appraiser's first impressions of a candidate may color his evaluation of all subsequent behavior. In the case of negative primacy effect, the employee may seem to do nothing right; in the case of a positive primacy effect, the employee can do no wrong (Harris, p.192).

(ii) Halo: The Halo error occurs when one aspect of the subordinate's performance affects the rater's evaluation of other performance dimensions. If a worker has few absences, his supervisor might give the worker a high rating in all other areas of work. Similarly an employee might be rated high on performance simply because he had a good dress sense and comes to office punctually!.

(iii) Horn effect: The rater's bias is in the other direction, where one negative quality of the employee is being rated harshly. For example, the ratee does not smile normally, so he cannot get along with people!

(iv) Leniency: Depending on rater's own mental make-up at the time of appraisal, raters may be rated very strictly or very leniently. Appraisers generally find evaluating others difficult, especially where negative ratings have to be given. A professor might hesitate to fail a candidate when all other students have cleared the examination. The Leniency error can render an appraisal system ineffective. If everyone is to be rated high, the system has not done anything to differentiate among employees.

(v) Central tendency: An alternative to the leniency effect is the central tendency, which occurs when appraisers rate all employees as average performers. For example, a professor, with a view to play it safe, might give a class grades nearly equal to B, regardless of the differences in individual performance.

(vi) Stereotyping: Stereotyping is a mental picture that an individual holds about a person because of that person's sex, age, religion, caste, etc. By generalizing behavior on the basis of such blurred images, the rater grossly overestimates or underestimates a persons' performance. For example, employees from rural areas might be rated poorly by raters having a sophisticated urban background if they view rural background negatively.

(vii) Recency effect: In this case the rater gives greater weightage to recent occurrences than earlier performance. For example, an excellent performance that may be six or seven months old is conveniently forgotten while giving a poor rating to an employee's performance which is not so good in recent weeks. Alternatively, the appraisal process may suffer due to a 'spill over effect'