Dive Brief:

• An article at Human Resource Executive explores the impact culture has on the performance review process.
• The article looks at the recent work of Jisoo Ock and Fred Oswald, Rice University psychology professers who wrote a paper titled "Managing the Interpersonal Aspect of Performance Management" (it appeared in Industrial and Organizational Psychology).
• According to the article, the workplace social environment either can encourage or inhibit constructive feedback during employee performance evaluations.

Dive Insight:

The piece points out that for various reasons performance reviews can be skewed. For example, supervisors are legitimately concerned about demotivating or disengaging employees by providing appraisal ratings that may be accurate, but are at the low end of the rating scale. As such, having ratings clustered at the high end of the rating scale tends to be more common, the article says.

So what to do? Experts mentioned strategies that include offering incentives to raters to be accurate, provide training for managers and supervisors, introducing continuous feedback, and creating an "improving" culture.

"By HR being the 'keeper' of the culture,” Doug Terry, a managing principal with Korn Ferry, told HRE, “they assure that when the performance evaluation happens, both colleagues and supervisors feel inspired to embrace the process in a positive way.”