Just Practicing: Put Those Poor Performers behind BARS Apr 97

Recently my esteemed friend Mark, who asked me to omit his last name, sought my professional counsel as a practicing I-O psychologist. He told me that at a recent staff meeting one of his direct reports, Stanley, had poked gentle humor at another direct report, Fred, for completing a project a week late. Everyone laughed, including mild-mannered Fred, who subsequently returned to his cubicle at the end of the staff meeting and fired off an email to Stanley that, among other things, accused Stanley's mother of committing several unrepeatable improprieties. This touched off a flame mail war so hot it melted the insides of Stanley and Fred's PCs. There were charges and countercharges involving sons, daughters, wives, sisters, cousins, neighbors, cats, dogs-and even one allegation involving some unsuspecting sheep. It was when the sheep allegation was mysteriously posted on Mark's employer's intranet site-accompanied by some rather provocative clip art-that the situation finally came to Mark's attention. He called me within the hour looking for advice.

Fortunately, performance appraisal is one of the areas where we claim deep professional expertise as I-O psychologists. "Give me a little time to consult with my colleagues and review my grad school notes," I told him. "I'm confident I'll be able to provide you with some solid, practical advice."

I promptly contacted my esteemed colleague Elaine Pulakos, who in my eyes is and always will be the Queen of Performance Appraisal. Together we reviewed the notes we had taken in our respective graduate job performance classes, which can essentially be summarized as follows:

There are many different rating scale formats including BOS, BES, BARS, BSS, BACKS, BUTTS, and Just Plain BS.
Raters have cognitions, but usually can be trained not to.

Elaine and I quickly determined that cognition was not the problem here, so we focused on rating scales as the solution to Mark's problem. The question was, which scale format? We used the statistically significant approach of scientific coin flips, impartially observed by our esteemed cocktail waitress Myndy with two Y's and our equally esteemed bartender Steve with two E's, and as a result settled on the BARS format.

The one problem with BARS, of course, is that they require critical incidents. This stymied us for a moment, but we ingeniously resolved this problem-in the best tradition of practitioner expediency-by making some up. We called the resulting rating scale the "Two Guys Who Ought to Get Along Scale." It features the following behavioral anchors:

6.9 = Sends other guy sweet valentines, even when it's not Valentine's Day

5.8 = Invites other guy to go fishing; brings enough Ho-Ho's and beer for two (I thank my esteemed colleague Steve Ashworth for his help with this anchor)

4.1 = Waters plants in other guy's cubicle when plants are looking dry

3.14159 = Acknowledges other guy with manly grunts when passing in hallway

2.4 = Acknowledges other guy with manly grunts and inflammatory hand gestures when passing in hallway

1.3 = Waters plants in other guy's cubicle when plants are looking dry; "accidentally" uses salt water

As you can see for yourself, the Two Guys scale meets all the important standards for rating scales spelled out in the top human resource textbooks, such as it contains both words and numbers. So we're pretty confident it would survive some of the more nit-picky requirements, like reliability and validity for example.

Elated with our progress, I express-mailed the scale to Mark the next day, along with some rater training materials from Elaine's dissertation and the vintage videotapes on effective performance coaching featuring my esteemed colleague Wally Borman (which prove that it wasn't 20 years of frozen Minne-snow-ta winters that turned his hair silver). I then called Mark to explain how to use the Two Guys scale to depict the gap between expected and actual performance, the importance of listening to his employees' perspectives on their performance, the benefits of mutually agreeing on performance goals and an improvement plan, and strategies for timely follow-up.

Three days later, he called me back with a progress report. "They really liked the rating scale," he said. "Particularly Stanley, who said he never would have thought up that salt water trick on his own. Which reminds me-don't be surprised when you get Fred's bill for his rare African violet."

We commiserated for a while. Then Mark asked if I had any additional advice. "I subscribe to half a dozen newsletters on how to be a good manager," he told me. "During the past 5 years, there have been more articles on performance management than any other topic. What are cutting edge I-O psychologists doing to help those of us in the management trenches?"

I scanned my memory banks for an answer. What articles on performance appraisal had I read in JAP and Personnel Psychology recently? What papers were scheduled for the upcoming SIOP conference? Had we responded to the critics outside our profession exhorting us to do research that would lead to better performance management practices? Had we listened to discussants and panelists at SIOP conferences who for more than a decade have been pleading with us to move beyond brain-dead parametric research design variations on performance appraisal topics of no practical or theoretical interest?

And then I remembered. We had indeed listened to the cries of the prophets; we had indeed discovered performance appraisal topics more worthy of our attention. Eagerly, I shared with my friend the latest, hottest, coolest research on performance appraisal-the research that would enable our field to respond to those accusing us of wandering from our focus on important, applied research.

"Mark, are you familiar with the recent findings on individual difference correlates of self-other rating discrepancies?"

This marks the first in what may or may not be a series of articles on life as an I-O practitioner. The opinions expressed in this article are strictly nobody's-not even the author's, and certainly not the editor of TIP. Please direct all complaints and concerns to the TIP editor.

Praise, kudos, and suggestions for future articles can be emailed directly to me at jmchenry@microsoft.com.