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Working With Social Comparisons in the Appraisal and Management of Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

R. Blake Jelley
R. Blake Jelley*
Affiliation:
School of Business, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to R. Blake Jelley, School of Business, University of Prince Edward Island, 550 University Avenue, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, CanadaC1A 4P3. E-mail: bjelley@upei.ca
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Extract

Research and practice in performance appraisal and performance management seem to suffer from the same “delusion of absolute performance” that Rosenzweig (2007, p. 112) described with respect to commentators’ evaluations of company performance in a competitive market economy. Commentators on business success factors have tended to speciously neglect or downplay the relative nature of performance (Rosenzweig, 2007). Downplaying the relative nature of performance is apparently the strategy endorsed by most performance appraisal scholars, too. Goffin, Jelley, Powell, and Johnston (2009) estimated that less than 4% of the published performance rating research has involved relative or social-comparative approaches, despite demonstrable advantages for relative over absolute rating formats (discussed below). Similarly, social comparison research and organizational scholarship have not traditionally been closely integrated (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007; Greenberg, Ashton-James, & Ashkanasy, 2007).

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 288 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2016 

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