This case study is about the newly appointed vice president, Rob Winchester and about the difficulties he faced shortly after his university career began .Rob's boss, Sweetwater's president assigned him the first task of improving the performance appraisal system used to evaluate secretarial and clerical performance. In this case, the main difficulty is the performance appraisal which was directly tied to salary increases given at the end of the year. The graphic rating forms which were used to evaluate clerical staff were not efficient as these forms never gave the true evaluation of performance. So, to change the faulty performance appraisal system two Sweetwater experts gave their recommendations to solve the problem. The first recommendation was not to use graphic rating forms as this rating method did not provide any clear picture about the good or bad performance. The second recommendation was not to force administrators to arbitrarily rate at least half their secretaries as something less than excellent. The recommendations given by the experts were good and made sense but these recommendations created problems like efficacy of any graphic rating forms if it is compared to the original forced ranking approach used by Rob and what should be the basis of performance appraisal.

ANALYSIS OF THE CASE:

The job of Rob Winchester was to completely change the performance rating system of the university because the previous system was dealing with high staff turnover ratio and also the process didnt look just. The initial performance appraisal form was filled by administrators. Administrators had to rate their secretaries on the basis of work they have done. The problem with this form was that every administrator used to rate their secretary as excellent so as to avoid staff turnover and on the other hand if the secretaries were not given hikes in their salaries they were moving to another job in the private sector as the private was giving them better salaries than Sweetwater U. According to the research the success of any performance appraisal system was directly related to the human response given to them by the staff. In this case, the response was not good as the staff that doesnt get good appraisal leaves the university. Having new staff every year was also good not a good choice for the university. So it didnt leave any choice for the administrators but to give most of the secretaries excellent to keep them on the job

The administrators were not given anything for the good work done by their staff or for ranking themproperly. Thus administrators were not much interested in what their secretaries are getting. So they started giving excellent to as much secretaries as possible to keep them away from leaving the job. With this thing one more problem came up with the system was that it was letting even the incompetent secretaries to enjoy the benefits like increments in the salaries. This subsequently led to the decrease in the overall quality of the work. The Appraisal form completely lacked procedural justice, as no one checked that whether the given ratings are on performance or not. Also the secretary given a very good rating is really worth it or not. Lack of transparency in the system was the basic flaw in this system. This flaw leads to another problem which was Unclear Standards. The form only consists of four levels on which the secretary canbe graded i.e. Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor. Also the traits on which secretaries were to be marked were unclear. The given standards lacked in the clarity and hence these parameters used in the rating may be perceived differently by every person. Like, Good can be perceived by someone as just next to excellent, but any otherperson might perceive it as just better than fair. Therefore the administrator who is rating might not be happy with the work done by the secretary but the secretary might think that it was the best work done by him.( p. app1). By competition among secretaries, jealousy and race will reduce the efficiency of staff. The new appraisal system created by experts advised Rob not to relate salary hike with performance appraisal. This idea might be good when the appraisal system is not efficient. But salary hike is a big motivational force behind every employee working for a company. If the secretaries will not get salary hike for doing good work, then their interest in work might get affected and their efficiency will reduce. The new form created by experts suggests giving points to secretaries on different criteria. This might turn out to be good as numbers better describe performance than words. Performance Appraisal Of A Company Introduction The Vice President Winchester has been given the task of creating a new performance appraisal system for the secretarial and clerical staff of Sweetwater University as the current evaluation system does not satisfy a good performance appraisal system. The standards presently being used are very unclear and do not give a good view of how the job is being performed. Moreover the administrators are being very biased and are rating their employees above their real performance. Mr. Winchester has taken advice from performance appraisal experts who helped him address the issues.

The experts have recommended that new more detailed rating forms should be used. This means that the job should be analyzed so that the different aspects of the work done by secretaries are assessed, such as communication, typing speed, quality of the job done, initiative taken by the secretaries, creativity, integrity, team work, behavior and productivity.

1.Do you think that the experts recommendations will be sufficient to get most of the administrators to fill out the rating forms properly? Why? Why not? What additional actions (if any) do you think will be necessary?

2.Do you think that Vice President Winchester would be better off dropping graphic rating forms, substituting instead one of the other techniques we discussed in this chapter such as a ranking method? Why?

3.What performance appraisal system would you develop for the secretaries if you were Rob Winchester? Defend your answer.