The relationship between participation in the performance appraisal process and various employee reactions was explored through the meta-analysis of 27 studies containing 32 individual samples. The overall relationship (p) between participation and employee reactions, corrected for unreliability, was .61. Various conceptualizations and operationalizations of participation and employee reactions also were discussed and analyzed. Overall, appraisal participation was most strongly related to satisfaction, and value-expressive participation (i.e., participation for the sake of having one's "voice" heard) had a stronger relationship with most of the reaction criteria than did instrumental participation (i.e., participation for the purpose of influencing the end result). The results are discussed within the framework of organizational justice.Performance appraisal is frequently performed in organizations for a variety of purposes, including administrative decisions (e.g., raise, promotion), feedback and development, and personnel research. Thus, performance appraisals are among the most important human resource systems in organizations insofar as they represent critical decisions integral to a variety of human resource actions and outcomes (Judge & Ferris, 1993). Because of its prevalence and importance in organizations, performance appraisal is also one of the most widely researched areas in industrial/organizational psychology (Murphy & Cleveland, 1995).Of great concern to scientists and practitioners has been the issue of appraisal effectiveness and its measurement.
We applaud Ployhart's (2012) call for researchers in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology to engage and develop the literature in strategic management and, in fact, encourage an engagement with a wider set of the strategic management literature than that of the resource-based theory (RBT) that he champions. We encourage broader engagement for two reasons: (a) other theories in strategic management fit well with a microfoundational approach that can be influenced by I-O psychology and (b) there are limitations to RBT.Our focus is on the first reason, but we briefly touch on the second as there has been considerable ink spilt critiquing RBT's status as a theory (for a review see Kraaijenbrink, Spender, & Groen, 2010). Perhaps the most damaging critiques are that it is tautological (Priem & Butler, 2001) and that its model may not accurately predict the sources of sustained competitive advantage (Kraaijenbrink et al., 2010). However, a resource-based view (RBV)-in comparison to a theory-in which the use and configuration of resources in the context of the environment can serve as an effective orienting perspective. Indeed,
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