Career planning, performance management and appraisal
Career planning matches personal goals with organisational opportunities. Performance management is a continuous cycle; appraisal is its periodic rating, open to errors like halo and leniency.
Career concepts
| Concept | Author | Key idea |
|---|---|---|
| Career anchors | Edgar Schein | A self-image of talents, motives and values a person will not give up; eight anchors |
| Life-span career stages | Donald Super | Growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, decline |
| Personality-job fit (RIASEC) | John Holland | Realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional |
| Protean career | Douglas Hall | Self-directed career driven by personal values; success is psychological |
| Boundaryless career | Arthur and Rousseau | Moves across employers, industries and roles |
| Career plateau | General term | Point where further upward movement is unlikely |
| Dual career ladder | General term | Parallel technical and managerial paths to advancement |
Performance management cycle
- back to Plan (set goals)
Appraisal is one step in the cycle; performance management is the whole cycle (Michael Armstrong).
Appraisal methods
| Category | Methods and notes |
|---|---|
| Traditional (past-oriented) | Straight ranking, paired comparison, forced distribution, graphic rating scale, checklist, essay, critical incident, confidential report |
| Modern (future-oriented) | MBO, BARS, assessment centre, 360-degree feedback, human resource accounting, psychological appraisal |
| Paired comparison | Each employee is compared with every other; pairs = N(N − 1) ÷ 2 |
| Forced distribution | Raters place fixed shares of staff in each category, like a bell curve; curbs leniency and central tendency |
| BARS | Behaviourally anchored rating scale: a rating scale anchored with critical incidents |
| MBO | Superior and subordinate jointly set goals, monitor progress and review results |
Rating errors
| Error | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Halo (or horn) effect | One good (or bad) trait colours all ratings |
| Leniency and strictness | Rating everyone too high or too low |
| Central tendency | Rating everyone near the middle of the scale |
| Recency effect | Weighting recent events and ignoring the rest of the period |
| Similar-to-me bias | Rating people like oneself more favourably |
| Contrast error | Judging against other employees instead of against standards |
Worked example: paired comparison
A manager ranks 8 employees by paired comparison. How many comparisons are needed?
- Pairs = N(N − 1) ÷ 2 = 8 × 7 ÷ 2.
- 8 × 7 = 56; 56 ÷ 2 = 28.
- Check by counting: the first employee is paired with 7 others, the next with 6 new ones, and so on: 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 28.
28 comparisons. For 10 employees: 10 × 9 ÷ 2 = 45.
NET asks you to classify appraisal methods as traditional or modern, name the rating error in a scenario, match career concepts with authors, and compute paired-comparison counts.
Typical MCQ: “How many comparisons does the paired comparison method need for 8 employees?” 8 × 7 ÷ 2 = 28. Trap: forgetting to divide by 2 gives 56.
Typical MCQ: “Who introduced management by objectives?” Peter Drucker, in 'The Practice of Management' (1954). Trap: Likert is linked with participative management systems, not with MBO.
Rating errors HLCR: halo, leniency, central tendency, recency. Pairs = N(N − 1) ÷ 2.