The roles of rater goals and ratee performance levels in the distortion of performance ratings.

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The goal-directed perspective of performance appraisal suggests that raters with different goals will give different ratings. Considering the performance level as an important contextual factor, we conducted 2 studies in a peer rating context and in a nonpeer rating context and found that raters do use different rating tactics to achieve specific goals. Raters inflated their peer ratings under the harmony, fairness, and motivating goal conditions (Study 1, N = 103). More important, raters inflated their ratings more for low performers than for high and medium performers. In a nonpeer rating context, raters deflated ratings for high performers to achieve the fairness goal, and they inflated ratings for low performers to motivate them (Study 2, N = 120).