Question

Adam is a Senior Manager of Sales and Marketing whose personality can be described as good-natured, tolerant, forgiving and helpful especially toward his team of sales representatives. As such, it is common for him to rate the performance of his sales representatives as ‘excellent’ even though the team occasionally failed to achieve their targeted sales volume. One day, the Vice President of Sales, called upon Adam to query about the declining sales of his team for the past two months even though the sales team has received the highest amount of bonus compared to other staff in other department.

(a) Identify the error made by Adam in rating his sales representatives.

(b) Describe with suitable examples three (3) other errors and biases in performance evaluation which might affect Adam’s ratings on his subordinates.

Answer 1

The error exhibited by Adam is a rating error in the form of leniency error since every employee has been rated highly. This has introduced a bias whereby the sales are low but according to their rating, they have performed exceptionally which is why it does not match up with the sales data which is why Adam was called for questioning. Because of his interpersonal relationship with the employees as well as not wanting to be perceived as strict or remain in their favor, Adam has essentially rated each individual as a high working employee.

There are different forms of rating errors that are represented closely to leniency errors, such as central tendency error, where the supervisor rates each employee as average or closer to average without considering their actual performance. Another error is contrast error where employees are compared to each other rather than their objectives, leading to an error in consideration due to compression. We also have a halo effect where the supervisor takes one good aspect of the employee as the representation of their performance rather than comparing it based on their performance.

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