Performance Appraisal Interviews Research Articles

Multilingualism in performance appraisal interviews: strategies to bridge language gaps

This paper explores three multilingual strategies to bridge the lack of a shared first language as they are used during performance appraisal interviews, namely English as a business lingua franca, receptive multilingualism, and a lay interpreter. The study is based on authentic video-recorded performance appraisal interviews at a globally active Belgian company, and follow-up interviews with the managers. The analysis focuses on how the company deals with multilingualism from a management perspective, how the managers perceive these multilingual strategies from a language ideological perspective, and how these language ideological beliefs shape the language practices of the performance appraisal interviews. We conclude that this study provides novel insights into how globalized companies deal with multilingualism in the high-stakes and potentially sensitive interactional context of a performance appraisal interview by underlining the intertwined nature of language ideological beliefs and language practices as part of a broader multilingual language management strategy.

Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal: Problems of documentation, tellability, and failed authority

AbstractDifficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a documentable issue. We describe the process by which the problem that the employee initially described as an organizational leadership issue became redefined as a personal matter, which was not the responsibility of the supervisor. We show how this happened by the supervisor refraining from treating the employee's problem as “tellable” on its own terms, which led to the employee repeatedly changing her storyline. We argue that the persistence of inequalities in organizational interactions may be due to documentation difficulties, which are anchored in cultural expectations that bias the tellability of events in ways that promote gender inequality.

Exploring the limits of the pastoral profession

Two discourses frame the pastoral profession in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway: one is the professional, which emphasises religion, while the other is organisational and foregrounds management. This article explores interactions, between pastors and a dean, that are situated on the boundaries of these two discourses. From the theoretical perspective of institutional boundary work, I analyse a case study that highlights observational data, and in particular, meetings and performance appraisal interviews with pastors. The research question is as follows: How do interactions between pastors and deans serve as spaces for discursive boundary work by the pastoral profession? As the church aligns itself with modern work organisations, the findings show how the clergy construct themselves and their work by drawing on both discourses. This article discusses how pastoral work is perceived discursively as both a modern occupation and also a religious profession through efforts that can be described as competitive, collaborative and configurational boundary work. Interactions constitute a space where the actors work for, at and through these boundaries by negotiating their core work, relationships and theology.

Old Wine in New Wineskins: Professionalism and Managerialism in the Performance Appraisal Interviews of Pastors in the Church of Norway

Performance appraisal interviews are a distinct feature of modern work organisations. A generic organisational script, appraisals have also been adopted by traditional professions within old religious institutions. Based on the theory of institutional logics, this article aims at providing new knowledge about the interplay of professionalism and managerialism in pastoral appraisals. It addresses the following research question: How do professional and managerial logics intersect in performance appraisal interviews of pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway? This study clarifies the function, contents and ambiguity of appraisals by interviewing pastors and their leaders and analysing their experiences and expectations of appraisals. The author discusses how ideal-typical professional and managerial logics are demarcated and hybridised in appraisals. With the church in a state of transition, this study shows how the pastor profession constructs itself in appraisals by drawing on both logics yet primarily safeguarding professionalism.

Identity gatekeeping in New Work Order organizations

Abstract While much has been written on the transition of organizational life into the New Work Order (NWO) and the effects this has had on employees in language-centered economic spaces, few studies have attempted to tease out how these NWO-expectations have affected less language-centered workplaces. In this article, I focus on such a workplace, namely a medical lab, and I tease out processes of what I call ‘identity gatekeeping’. With this term I refer to the fact that NWO-employees are expected to be knowledge-workers whose identities need to be aligned with organizational expectations. As such, these identities become a crucial object of intra-organizational gatekeeping. Focusing on three performance appraisal interviews and using a social-realist discourse-analytical approach, I demonstrate how the superior’s interactional identity negotiations either mold or silence dissident identities depending on the employee’s future professional aspirations. Finally, the implications of these interactional negotiation processes for NWO-ways of working are discussed.

Doing age in the workplace: Exploring age categorisation in performance appraisal

Ageism in the manager–employee relationship is one of the main obstacles towards an age-inclusive workplace. Ageism in the labour market is rooted in the use of age as an organising principle of employment relations. This article contributes to the study of ageism in the workplace by investigating how stages of life, as normalised age categories, are mobilised through discursive practices in performance appraisals. Based on the analysis of video recordings of actual performance appraisal interviews at an Italian labour union, three discursive ways of ‘doing age’ – or of how age, as a constructed social category, is performed and enacted – were identified: quantification (e.g. number of years in the organisation), ‘ageing within the organisation’ and age-group membership identification (e.g. ‘young’ vs. ‘old’). The analysis suggests that stages of life categories and age attributes are ‘done’ in social interactions and employed by both employees and managers as shared culture to sustain ongoing organisational activities, thereby reproducing discriminatory age norms and stereotypes. The study demonstrates how the ordering power of the stages of life categories is situated in organisational culture and challenges the implementation of equal and inclusive workplace policies.

The complexity of performance appraisal interviews

The complexity of performance appraisal interviews

On the participatory agency of texts: Using institutional forms in performance appraisal interviews

Abstract Drawing on studies of the performative effects and agency of texts in organizations, the paper investigates how the agency of texts figures through their participatory status in interaction. The empirical data for the study consist of video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in a Finnish public organization in which the interaction relies heavily on an appraisal form. The data are analyzed through a sequential analysis that draws on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnographic knowledge. The analysis shows that the human participants orient to three different acts that are inscribed in the textual document: 1) presenting demands for the participants; 2) offering topics for the discussion as well as perspectives from which those topics should be discussed; and 3) suggesting conventional ways of progressing in the interaction. Furthermore, the material and the semiotic facets of textual documents are shown to be systematically related in that specific orientations to the material aspect of the paper form entail specific orientations to the semiotic content. The study sheds light on the subtle ways through which the distributed, albeit dissymmetric, agency of human and non-human participants is constructed, and on how texts are treated as more or less authoritative in face-to-face interaction.

Human Resource Management and the Performance Appraisal: satisfaction analysis of the Guarda Nacional Republicana Administration Officers

In a culture of development and globalization, organizations need to value their human capital. It is here that Human Resources Management and each of its areas of expertise gain importance, among them the Performance Appraisal, as it has a direct impact on the results of organizations and the performance of employees. It is from here that the subject of this research arises, to analyze the Performance Appraisal satisfaction of the Officers of Administration of the Guarda Nacional Republicana. This investigation is pertinent due to the lack of studies in public sector organizations, of which the Guarda Nacional Republicana is part, as one military security force. The overall objective of this paper is to analyze the satisfaction resulting from the Performance Appraisal process in the Guarda Nacional Republicana. Following the hypotheticaldeductive method, a questionnaire survey allowed to collect enough data to test the hypotheses of investigation, using parametric and nonparametric techniques. Thus, it was possible to conclude that the Administration Officers of the Guarda Nacional Republicana feel a slight Performance Appraisal satisfaction. This result was strongly influenced by the unsatisfactory results related to the Performance Appraisal System and the Performance Appraisal Interview, notorious in the results of the analysis of the data collected.

Complaining About Others at Work

ABSTRACTThe article investigates the interactional work required to launch a complaint about nonpresent third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain, and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilitate entry into complaining by means of building joint epistemic access and affective stance toward the complainable. Focusing on the institutional context of performance appraisal interviews, the study further indicates that the legitimation of complaining is collaboratively treated as a managerial task. Data are in Finnish and Danish with English translation.

Knowledge talk in performance appraisal interviews

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper examines video-recorded sequences of interaction where ‘knowledge’ is made relevant in annual performance appraisal interviews (PAI ...

Engaging the Hearts and Minds of Followers: Leader Empathy and Language Style Matching During Appraisal Interviews

Leader empathy has received increased scholarly and practical attention in recent years. However, empirical studies that explore the functionality of leader empathy and that disclose which objective micro-level behaviors actually characterize empathic face-to-face interactions remain sparse. This study explores the role of leaders’ empathic communication style in a sample of 48 audiotaped performance appraisal interviews. Our multimethod approach disclosed that ratings of supervisors’ empathic communication style were positively related to employees’ intentions to change and to employees’ perceptions of supervisor likeability. Fine-grained linguistic analyses (N = 358,586 words) further provided insights into the underlying behavioral manifestation of leader empathy: verbal mimicry in the form of language style matching between supervisors and employees was positively related to supervisors’ empathic communication style. Additional analyses showed that supervisors who communicated more empathically used less second-person pronouns (“you”) and agreed more frequently with their employees. Finally, we found differences in the mean percentage use of personal pronouns between supervisors and employees. Specifically, supervisors used significantly more second-person (“you”) and first-person plural (“we”) pronouns and fewer first-person singular (“I”) pronouns than their employees. We discuss how the findings of this field study enhance our theoretical understanding of leader empathy as a functional leadership skill, and we highlight practical recommendations for conducting more effective appraisal interviews.

The interactional ventriloquization of written records in the service of authority

In this article, we analyze three cases in which subordinates’ oral claims are refuted by superiors who draw on written documents of which the subordinates are the (in)direct authors. In this ventriloquization process (Cooren, 2012), the superiors construct these written documents as facts, which have institutionalized the evidential status of the claims. In particular, we use courtroom data and data from performance appraisal interviews in a medical organization. This comparison revealed that the latter allowed for a more flexible handling of written documents, while the former displayed a much more rigid structure in which the ‘incorporation’ of written records immediately entailed a number of interactionally non-negotiable implications. Overall, it became clear that by drawing on the different ontological status of written records, superiors subject subordinate participants to their authority, as such constituting the organization in the name of which they are acting and which reflexively entitles them to act in this way.

Agency theory and performance appraisal: How bad theory damages learning and contributes to bad management practice

Performance appraisal interviews remain central to how employees are scrutinised, rewarded and sometimes penalised by managers. But they are also often castigated as ineffective, or even harmful, to both individuals and organisations. Exploring this paradox, we highlight the influence of agency theory on the (mal)practice of performance appraisal. The performative nature of human resource management increasingly reflects an economic approach within which its practices are aligned with agency theory. Such theory assumes that actors are motivated mainly or only by economic self-interest. Close surveillance is required to eliminate the risk of shirking and other deviant behaviours. It is a pessimistic mind-set about people that undermines the supportive, co-operative and developmental rhetoric with which appraisal interviews are usually accompanied. Consequently, managers often practice appraisal interviews while holding onto two contradictory mind-sets, a state of Orwellian Doublethink that damages individual learning and organisational performance. We encourage researchers to adopt a more radical critique of appraisal practices that foregrounds issues of power, control and conflicted interests between actors beyond the analyses offered to date.

Appraising academic appraisal in the new public management university

Against a backdrop of new public management (NPM) thinking and managerialism generally applied to universities in a range of countries, this study examines one of its manifestations – performance management for academics. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 academics at an Australian university, this article identifies six stances regularly adopted by those conducting performance appraisal interviews with academics. These are labelled ‘nurturing’, ‘hard-driving’, ‘self-serving’, ‘coddling’, ‘disengaged’ and ‘hostile’. Each of these appraisal stances is described in detail and then considered from two perspectives – that of academics themselves and of NPM. The material presented suggests that while a ‘nurturing’ stance was viewed favourably by the academics interviewed, it is out of step with NPM thinking. ‘Hard-driving’ and ‘self-serving’ stances, which directly reflect NPM thinking, were disliked by many (although not all) of the interviewees who had experienced them. The most common appraising stance – a ‘disengaged’ one – was widely condemned, as was the ‘hostile’ stance, yet both stances have much in common with the ruthlessness of NPM.

Making objectives common in performance appraisal interviews

This paper investigates goal setting in performance appraisal interviews. The data are video-recorded performance appraisal interviews from a Finnish public sector organization. The study focuses on the role of writing in deciding on common goals for future development. Drawing from conversation analytical methods, the empirical analysis highlights three central interactional patterns for the setting of goals: a proposal–approval/rejection format, a question–answer format, and a summary format. It is shown that they are different in terms of how they allow the employee to participate in the process. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that writing practices play a crucial role in these interactional sequences. It is thus argued that goal setting is inextricably connected to the discursive action of completing the appraisal form.

108 The annual performance appraisal interview – a tool for employee development

108 The annual performance appraisal interview – a tool for employee development

110 The relationship between the care burdens, perceived stress levels and coping styles of the parents of children having a treatment at haematology-oncology clinics

announced in advance and employees are expected to prepare for them. For quality of the interviews it is important that they are carried out an in-depth, systematically managed, planned and confidential. The interviews are also documented. The time required for one interview is between one hour and a half hour. Results and Discussion: For the annual performance appraisal interview to achieve a good final effect, it is necessary to properly plan it, carry it out and evaluate. In the end, it is necessary to use the acquired information prudently for designing strategies for development of employees. The data that are collected in the interviews usefully contribute to the decision-making process in regard to the functioning of the organization in the future. In the process of preparation of the OI for Joint Commission Accreditation the interviews are becoming an important element for other levels of leadership and other professions in our organization and can be successfully introduced. They will also contribute to excellence in human resource management. Conclusions: The annual performance appraisal interviews are an effective tool for employees’ development. It is a way for the employees to enhance motivation, job satisfaction and loyalty to organization. If employees carry out work responsibilities with satisfaction their work is done faster and more efficiently. The interviews that are performed with quality and have an important and valued place in human resource management have the motivational power to encourage and empower the employees for their professional and personal development. No conflict of interest.

From paper to practice

This paper examines how a standardized question is launched and received in a corpus of performance appraisal interviews, with a focus on how pre-­formulated questions are translated into interaction. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate that the same question becomes many different actions in practice. Prefaces as well as prosodic and lexical alterations make relevant different responses, and as such, the question can be recruited to initiate diverse interactional projects such as assessments and other socially delicate activities. As a consequence, goals of uniformity and standardization may be subverted. The interactional adaptations further evidence the strength of recipient design as reformulations also result in more fitted and personalized answers. Our study contributes to the understanding of standardization versus interactionalization, and points to the strong interrelationship between question design and the fitting of response options.

Looking Forward to Performance Improvement: A Field Test of the Feedforward Interview for Performance Management

This study examines the effectiveness of the feedforward interview for improving the job performance of employees relative to a traditional performance appraisal interview in a business equipment firm. Managers (n = 25) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Employees (n = 70) who engaged in a feedforward interview with their manager were observed by an anonymous peer to perform significantly better on the job four months later than employees (n = 75) who received the company's traditional performance appraisal interview. The finding that the feedforward intervention increased performance relative to the performance appraisal indicates that the effect is a relatively enduring one. The results suggest that the feedforward interview should prove useful for human resource managers who are searching for ways to increase the performance of their organization's human resources over and above the traditional performance appraisal. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.