Preguntas Guías: Muchinsky Capitulo.

1. ¿Qué es el desempeño?

Performance is synonymous with behavior; it is what people actually do, and it can be observed.
Performance includes those actions that are relevant to the organization’s goals and can be
measured in terms of each individual’s proficiency (that is, level of contribution)

2. ¿Qué es la efectividad?

Effectiveness refers to the evaluation of the results of performance, and it is beyond the
influence or control of the individual. Measures of effectiveness, though of major importance to
the organization, are contaminated by factors over which the employee has little influence. An
example of effectiveness is how many promotions an employee has had in a certain period of
time—say, three years. The number of promotions is affected by the availability of job openings
to which one can be promoted and the qualifications of other candidates.

3. ¿Cómo puede ayudar la evaluación de desempeño a las organizaciones?

First, they can enhance the quality of organizational decisions ranging from pay raises to
promotions to discharges.

Second, performance appraisals can enhance the quality of individual decisions, ranging from
career choices to the development of future strengths. Accurate performance feedback is an
important component of success in training and provides critical input for forming realistic self-
assessments in the workplace. Performance feedback is also a key to maintaining high levels of
work motivation.

Third, performance appraisals can affect employees’ views of and attachment to their
organization. An organization’s successful performance appraisal system may help to build
employee commitment and satisfaction. Employees who believe that an organization’s decisions
are irrational or unfair are unlikely to develop a strong commitment to that organization.
Finally, formal performance appraisals provide a rational, legally defensible basis for personnel
decisions. There must be a defensible explanation for why some employees are promoted or
discharged or receive differential pay raises compared with others

4. Menciona y explica cada uno de los usos de la evaluación del desempeño.

Formación de personal: Feedback highlights employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Of

course, the appraisal should pertain to job-related characteristics only. Deficiencies or
weaknesses then become the targets for training.

Administración de sueldos y salarios: Perhaps the second most common use of

performance appraisals is to determine raises. Pay increases are often made, in part, on the basis
of job performance.

Ubicación: Performance appraisal information is vital for placement decisions. New

employees (such as management trainees) are often exposed to many tasks or jobs at first. By
identifying the employee’s strengths, performance appraisal indicates where the person’s talents
might best be used.

Ascensos: Promotions may be based on how well an employee performs on his or her
current job. Promotions are usually granted based on a combination of seniority and merit.

Despidos: Termination of employment must be predicated on just cause. A typical just

cause is inadequate job performance, as determined through performance appraisal. Many
lawsuits stemming from performance appraisals allege the fired employee was the victim of a
“wrongful discharge.”

Investigación personal: In many criterion-related validity studies, assessments of the

criterion are derived from performance appraisals. Recall that the criterion is a measure of job
performance, and that is what performance appraisals are supposed to measure.

5. ¿Cuáles son las recomendaciones para tener evaluaciones del desempeño legalmente
firmes?
Appraisal Criteria:
Should be objective rather than subjective
Should be job-related or based on job analysis
 Should be based on behaviors rather than traits
Should be within the control of the ratee
Should relate to specific functions, not global assessments
Appraisal Procedures
Should be standardized and uniform for all employees within a job group
Should be formally communicated to employees
Should provide notice of performance deficiencies and of opportunities to correct them
Should provide access for employees to review appraisal results
Should provide formal appeal mechanisms that allow for employee input
Should use multiple, diverse, and unbiased raters
Should provide written instructions for training raters
Should require thorough and consistent documentation across raters that includes specific
examples of performance based on personal knowledge
Should establish a system to detect potentially discriminatory effect or abuses of the
system overall
6. Menciona y explica cada una de las fuentes de información para la evaluación del
desempeño:

Datos objetivos: Using objective production data as an index of how well an employee is
performing on the job is limited in its frequency and value. For a person in the job of a machine
operator, job performance may be measured by counting the number of objects produced per
day, per week, and so forth. Although each of these objective production measures has some
degree of intuitive appeal, none is usually a complete measure of job performance. Two
problems in particular affect each of these measures. First, we would like to assume that
differences in performance across people reflect true differences in how well these people
perform their jobs. Unfortunately, variability in performance can be due to factors beyond the
individual’s control. One machine operator may produce more because he or she works with a
better machine. The second problem with objective performance measures is that they rarely tell
the whole story.
 Datos de personal: The second type of appraisal information is personnel data, the data
retained by a company’s human resources office. The two most common indices of performance
are absenteeism and accidents.

Datos de juicios: The most common means of appraising performance is through

judgmental data or evaluations from raters. Because errors occur in making ratings, it is
important to understand the major types of rating errors.

¿Cuáles son los tres errores de juicios?

Halo errors: are evaluations based on the rater’s general feelings about an employee.
The rater generally has a favorable attitude toward the employee that permeates all evaluations of
this person. Typically the rater has strong feelings about at least one important aspect of the
employee’s performance. The feelings are then generalized to other performance factors, and the
employee is judged (across many factors) as uniformly good.

Leniency errors: are the second category. Some teachers are “hard graders” and others
“easy graders,” so raters can be characterized by the leniency of their appraisals. Harsh raters
give evaluations that are lower than the “true” level of ability (if it can be ascertained); this is
called severity or negative leniency. Easy raters give evaluations that are higher than the “true”
level; this is called positive leniency.

Central-tendency error: refers to the rater’s unwillingness to assign extreme—high or

low—ratings. Everyone is “average,” and only the middle (central) part of the scale is used. This
may happen when raters are asked to evaluate unfamiliar aspects of performance. Rather than not
respond, they play it safe and say the person is average in this “unknown” ability.

¿Cuáles son los incidentes críticos? Critical incidents are behaviors that result in
good or poor job performance. Anderson and Wilson (1997) noted that the critical-incidents
technique is flexible and can be used for performance appraisal as well as job analysis.
Supervisors record behaviors of employees that greatly influence their job performance. They
either keep a running tally of these critical incidents as they occur on the job or recall them at a
later time. Critical incidents are usually grouped by aspects of performance: job knowledge,
decision making ability, leadership, and so on. The end product is a list of behaviors (good and
bad) that constitute effective and ineffective job performance.
7. ¿Qué es el rendimiento contextual? Menciona ejemplos
Contextual performance Behavior exhibited by an employee that contributes to the
welfare of the organization but is not a formal component of an employee’s job duties.
Also called pro social behavior and extra-role behavior.
These are some examples of contextual performance:
Persisting with enthusiasm and extra effort as necessary to complete one’s own task
activities successfully
Volunteering to carry out task activities that are not formally part of one’s own job
Helping and cooperating with others
Endorsing, supporting, and defending organizational objectives
8. ¿Qué es la autoevaluación y la evaluación de los compañeros de trabajo?
With self-assessment, as the term suggests, each employee appraises his or her own
performance. The procedure most commonly used is a graphic rating scale.

In peer assessment, members of a group appraise the performance of their fellows.

According to Kane and Lawler (1978), three techniques are commonly used. One is peer
nomination, in which each person nominates a specified number of group members as
being highest on the particular dimension of performance. The second is peer ratings, in
which each group member rates the others on a set of performance dimensions using one
of several kinds of rating scales. The third technique is peer ranking, where each member
ranks all others from best to worst on one or more performance dimensions.

9. ¿Cómo debe ser el proceso de insumo a los empleados sobre su evaluación? In the
final step of appraisal, the employee and his or her superior review and discuss the
evaluation, usually referred to by the misnomer “performance appraisal interview. The
interview typically has two main objectives. The first is reviewing major job
responsibilities and how well the employee has met them. The second objective is future
planning, or identifying goals the employee will try to meet before the next review. Both
employee and superior should provide input in setting goals.
10. ¿Cuáles son las 7 características que contribuyen a que los empleados acepten sus
evaluaciones y perciban que fueron justas?
In a review of performance evaluations, Greenberg (1986) identified seven characteristics
that contribute to employees’ accepting their evaluations and feeling they were fair:

1. Solicitation of employee input prior to the evaluation and use of it

2. Two-way communication during the appraisal interview
3. The opportunity to challenge/rebut the evaluation
4. The rater’s degree of familiarity with the ratee’s work
5. The consistent application of performance standards
6. Basing of ratings on actual performance achieved
7. Basing of recommendations for salary/promotions on the ratings