MEASURING RESULTS AND BEHAVIORS

CHAPTER 5

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How to measure performance, adopting the two most common
approaches: results and behaviors

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 Measuring Results
• When one adopts a result approach , one needs to ask the
following key questions :-

– key accountabilities
• What are the different areas in which this individual is expected to focus
efforts

– expected objectives
• Within each area

– performance standards
• How do we know how well the results have been achieved

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 Determining
Accountabilities

Measuring
Results

Determining
Determining
Performance
Objectives
Standards

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 Determining Accountabilities

• Collect information about the job through the job description

• Job description provides information on tasks performed

• Tasks can be grouped in clusters based on their degree of

relatedness

• Each cluster or accountability is the broad area of the job

for which the employee is responsible for producing result s.

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 Determining Accountabilities

• Example :

– University professor has two key accountabilities

are
• Teaching
– Preparation and delivery of instructional materials to students

• Research
– Creation and dissemination of new knowledge .

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 Determining Accountabilities

After accountabilities have been identified . You need to determine the relative
degree of importance :

• What percentage of the employee’s time is spent performing each accountability?

• Is the accountability were performed inadequately, would there be a significant

impact on the work unit’s mission

• Is there a major consequence of error? Could inadequate performance of the

accountability contribute to the injury of death of the employee or others, serious
property damage or loss of time and money ?

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 Determining Objectives
• After the accountabilities have been identified , the next step is measuring result is

to determine specific objectives .

• The purpose of establishing objectives is to identify a limited number of highly

important results .that when achieved will have a dramatic impact on the overall

success of the organization .

• After objectives are set , employees should receive feedback on their progress

toward attaining the objectives.

• Rewards should be allocated to those employees who have reached their objectives.

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 Characteristics of Good Objectives

1. Specific and clear

2. Challenging but not impossible

3. Agreed upon

4. Significant

5. Prioritized

6. Bound by time

7. Achievable: sufficient skills, training and resources

8. Fully communicated

9. Flexible

10. Limited in number

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 Characteristics of Good Objectives
• Specific and clear

– Easy to understand , must be measurable .for example “Cut total cost 20% “

• Challenging

– Should be challenging but not impossible to achieve they must be stretch but employees
should feel that the objective are reachable.

• Agreed upon

– To be most effective objectives need to result from an agreement between the manager
and the employee
– Employees need an opportunity to participate in setting objectives

• Significant

– Objectives must be important to the organization , employees must believe that if the
objective is achieved it will make a critical impact on the overall success of the organization
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 Characteristics of Good Objectives
• Prioritized
– Not all objective are created equal , therefore , objectives should be prioritized and tackled one by
one .

• Bounded by time :
– Good objectives have deadlines , objectives lacking a time dimension are likely to be neglected.

• Achievable :
– Employees should have sufficient skills and training to achieve them if they don’t , then the
organization should make resources available so that the necessary skills are learned and equipment
is made available to achieve the goals

• Fully communicated :
– In addition to the manager and employee in question , the organizational member who maybe
affected by the objectives need to be aware of them.

• Flexible :
– Good objectives are not immutable they can and likely will change based on changes in the work of
business environment .

• Limited in number:
– To many objectives may become impossible to achieve , but too few may not make a sufficient
contribution to the organization objectives must be limited in number between 5-10 per period .
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 Determining Objectives example
• The professor of the university .
– Objective for teaching could be
• To obtain a student evaluation of teaching performance
of 3- 4 point scale .

– An objective for research could be

• To publish two articles in scholarly refereed journals per
year.

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 Determining Performance Standards

• After accountabilities and objectives have been determined the next

step is to define performance standards

• These are Yardstick is designed to help people understand to what

extent the objective has been achieved .

• Provides information to raters on what to look for to determine the

level of performance

• Provide information on acceptable and unacceptable performance

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 Determining Performance Standards

• Example :

– University professor

• To obtain a student evaluation of teaching performance

of at least 2 on 4 points scale

• To publish at least one article in scholarly referred

journals per year .

– The objective is the desired level of performance . Whereas

the standard is usually a minimum acceptable level of
performance .
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 Determining Performance Standards

• Considers various aspects of an objective, such as quality,

quantity, cost and time
• each of these aspects can be considered criteria to be used in
judging the extent to which and objective has been achieved.

• Quality

– How well the objectives has been achieved .

• Acceptance rate

• Error rate

• Feedback from users or customers

– Example customer complaint return 15

 Determining Performance Standards

• Quantity & cost :

– How much has been produced

– How many

– How often

• At what cost

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 Determining Performance Standards

• Time :
– Due dates

– Adherence to schedule

– Cycle time

– Deadlines

– How quickly ( time table , progress reports )

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 Determining Performance Standards

• Standards must include:

An action
Desired result
A due date
Some type of quality or quantity indicator
Cost .

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 Determining Performance Standards

• Example :
– Reduce overtime from 150 hours\month to 50 hours \month by December 1, 2014 ,
at cost not to exceed 20,000 SR .

• Action is :
– To reduce .

• The due date is :

– December 1, 2014 .

• Indicators are :
– The reduction in hours from 150-50 refers to quantity .

• Cost
– not to exceed 20,000 SR .

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 Determining Performance Standards

• Standards usually describe fully satisfactory performance.

• As soon the standards has been created
• One can create a standards that describe minimum performance and
outstanding performance .
• For example
• Minimum standard
– Reduce overtime from 150hours \month to 75 hours \months by December 1,2012 , at cost
not to exceed 20,000 SR.

• Outstanding standard
– Reduce overtime from 150hours \month to 40 hours \ months by October 1,2012 , at cost
not to exceed 18,000 SR.

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 Measuring Behaviors
• A behavior approach to measuring performance includes
– The assessment of the Competencies.
– Competencies are measurable of knowledge, skills and abilities
(KSA’s) that determine how result will be achieved.

• Examples of competencies:
• customer service,
• written or oral communication,
• creative thinking,
• dependability

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 Measuring Behaviors

• Have to measure behaviors through assigning indicators to

understand the extent to which an employee possesses a
competency

• Each indicator is an observable behavior that gives us

information regarding the competency in question

• Don’t measure competency directly, but actually the indicators,

which tell us whether a competency is present or not

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 Measuring Behaviors
Relationship Between Competency and Indicators

Competency

Indicator Indicator Indicator Indicator

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 Measuring Behaviors

Example:
• Leadership behavior

• Indicators for consideration:

• Supports subordinates’ projects
• Asks about the well-being of employees’ lives outside of work
• Encourages subordinates to reach their established goals
• Gets to know employees personally
• Shows respect for employees’ work and home lives

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 Measuring Behaviors

– Measurement of competencies is intrinsically

judgmental
– Systems used to evaluate competencies:

• Comparative systems: base the measurement on comparing

employees with one another

• Absolute systems: base the measurement on comparing

employees with a pre-specified performance standard

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Comparative and Absolute Behavioral Measurement Systems

Comparative Absolute

Simple rank order Essays

Alternation rank order Behavior checklists

Paired comparisons Critical incidents

Forced distribution Graphic rating scales

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 Comparative Systems
• Simple Rank Order System: employees are simply ranked from best
performer to worst performer

• Alternation Rank Order Procedure:

1. The supervisor lists all employees

2. The supervisor selects the best performer (#1), then the

worst performer (#n), then the second best (2), then the
second worst (#n-1), and so on

3. It alternates from top to bottom of the list until all employees

have been ranked
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 Comparative Systems

Paired Comparisons:
1. Clear comparisons are made between all pairs of employees to

be evaluated

2. Supervisors systematically compare the performance of each

employee against the performance of all other employees

3. The supervisor has to choose the better of each pair

4. Each individual’s rank is determined by counting the number

of times he or she was rated as better

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 Comparative Systems

• Forced Distribution:

1. Employees are allocated according to an approximately normal distribution

2. Ex: 20% exceeding expectations, 70% meeting expectations, 10% not meeting

expectations

3. Forced distribution issues:

4. assumed that performance scores are normally distributed and this may not be

always true

5. this may discourage workers from engaging in contextual performance behaviors

6. difficult to implement in organizations not experiencing any growths, and

especially in those organizations experiencing cutbacks

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 Comparative Systems

• Forced Distribution:

• give the lowest 10% a 90 days to improve and if they don’t they
should resign and take severance pay, if they don’t and they didn’t
improve they fire them without any severance pay.

• 15% high performers

• 20% high-average performers
• 30% average performers
• 20% low-average performers
• 15% low performers.

Low cost ,easy to use, difficult to explain to those evaluated

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 Absolute Systems

1. Supervisor’s provide evaluations of an employee’s performance without

making direct reference to other employees

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 Absolute Systems
Essay: written essays describing each employee’s strengths and weaknesses, and

making suggestions for improvement

– Pros: supervisors have the potential to provide detailed feedback to

employees regarding their performance

– Cons: essays are unstructured and each supervisor will write in his/her

preferred style and based on his/her own views on performance. This will

make comparisons difficult. Do not provide any quantitative data and are

subjective

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 Absolute Systems

Behavior checklist:

• Consists of a form listing behavioral statements that are indicators of the

various competencies to be measure

• The supervisors’ task is to indicate (“check”) statements that describe the

employee being rated

• These response categories are weighted; ex: 5 to 1

• Overall score for each employee is computed by adding the weights of the

responses that were checked

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 Example of Behavior Checklist Item

The employee arrives at work on time

1 2 3 4 5

Never sometimes Often Fairly often Always

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 Absolute Systems
• There is always an advantage of using five point scale
rather than seven , since its less complex
• And superior than three point scale as it is likely to
motivate performance improvement because
employees believe it is more doable to move up one
level on a five point scale than it is on the three point
scale
• In creating a scale we should pay attention to choose
anchors that are approximately equally spaced based
on rating included.
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 Critical Incidents Measurement
• Every job includes some critical behaviors that make a crucial difference

between doing a job effectively and doing it ineffectively

• Involves gathering reports of situations in which employees performed behaviors

that were especially effective or ineffective in accomplishing their jobs

• Allows supervisors to focus on actual job behaviors; but collecting them can be

time-consuming

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 Critical Incidents Measurement
– It is adopted by some companies
– They list the core competencies , and skill needed
– Then the group or the team write dozens of examples of different
levels of performance on each competency from infective to highly
effective
– The team was the one who build up the critical incidents illustrating
various performance level for each competency
– Then managers used this list by simply circling the behavior that best
described each employees in the work unit.

Alaa.I.Lary
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