Performance Appraisals Methods
The first method is known as Essay Appraisal whereby the source is required to answer a series of questions about the performance of the employee in essay form. Essay appraisal can be a behavioral or trait method relying on how the manager will write the essay. The essay can include the employees' strengths and weaknesses of their past performance ( DeNisi & Smith, 2014) . A Checklist Scale is the second method whereby the manager is asked various questions and responds to them with either yes or no. The final method is known as the Critical Incident Appraisals whereby the manager is supposed to record instances of the effective and ineffective behavior of the employee during the period between evaluations.
Strategies for conducting an appraisal interview
While performing an appraisal interview, it is important to encourage the participations of the workers by inviting them to share their opinions about their performance. As a manager ensure that during the interview one begins with positive feedback about the employees so as to put them at ease. Additionally, the interview should be a two-way discussion; hence the employees should contribute their views and ideas. Setting goals should be mutual to ensure that the workers participate in setting specific yet challenging achievable objectives for future work performance ( Armstrong et.al, 2014) . The manager should also ensure that the performance objectives and evaluation criteria are clear for next year. Hence both the manager and the workers should come into agreement about the performance goals and evaluation criteria.
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Reliability of appraisals
Appraisals should result in candid feedback that can be utilized to motivate and develop employees. However, appraisal reliability is one of the biggest problems facing most appraisal systems, and as a result, performance appraisals are often encountered with substantial resistance. For a performance appraisal system to be considered reliable, it must measure the performance of the employees consistently and objectively ( DeNisi & Smith, 2014) . The activity and result that an employee performs should be valued and measured the same. Failure to this reliability, the employees, will not have trust in the appraisals process, and this can lead to employee backlash.
Criterion deficiency and contamination issues
Criterion deficiency is a situation where a measure of criterion fails to include a critical element of the performance domain. Therefore, an increase in deficiency leads to a decrease in the relevance of the criterion. For a job domain to be deficient, a criterion must include all components of the necessary criterion domain ( Armstrong et.al, 2014) . Criterion contamination takes place when an actual criterion is not related to a conceptual criterion. Contamination may further be subdivided into two areas namely error and bias. An error refers to a random variation whereas bias is a systematic criterion contamination.
Rater errors
The most common types of rater bias include central tendency, leniency, strictness, harshness, forced distribution, and similarity. These rate errors reduce reliability of a performance appraisal procedure. Leniency bias occurs when the rater rates all the employees' performance higher than they should be rated whereas harshness bias occurs by rating the efforts of the employees lower than their real performance. On the other hand, central tendency leads to a rating bias whereby every employee is placed in the middle of the rating scale ( Armstrong et.al, 2014) . Forced distribution is a performance rating that requires managers to evaluate workers and rank them in either one of the three categories, (poor, good and excellent). These rate errors can be as a result of the personality or mood of the appraisal, and it poses a significant challenge. By utilizing a portion of the performance, scale heightens the likelihoods of unreliability because two raters with harshness tendency and leniency bias respectively can lead to two equal job activities being valued entirely different.
References
Armstrong, C. S., Ittner, C. D., & Larcker, D. F. (2014). An Exploratory Investigation of the Determinants and Ratings Implications of Performance Appraisal Plan Characteristics.
DeNisi, A., & Smith, C. E. (2014). Performance appraisal, performance management, and firm-level performance: a review, a proposed model, and new directions for future research. Academy of Management Annals , 8 (1), 127-179.
