Interpersonal Affect and Performance Appraisal: A Field Study

Abstract

Interpersonal affect has been found, in prior laboratory research, to be related to ratings of job performance. Such findings have been taken to mean that affect creates bias in ratings. The present study was conducted to determine if this relationship would hold up in a field setting. The present study was also designed to examine how structured diary‐keeping, and the nature of the appraisal instrument, might be related to affect‐appraisal relationships. The results for 85 raters, and 404 ratees, suggested that affect was significantly related to all ratings, but more strongly related to trait‐like ratings than task/outcome‐like ratings, and that having raters keep performance diaries actually increased the strength of the relationship between affect and ratings. We concluded that affect may not be a biasing influence on ratings, but may be a result of better subordinate performance. Results from an analysis of the diary content supported this conclusion. Implications for the role of affect on ratings and the nature of the relationship between past performance and interpersonal affect in field settings are discussed.

The impact of affective information on the professional judgments of more experienced and less experienced auditors

“…Ashby, Isen, Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Alice, & Turken, 1999;Mittal & Ross, 1998;Raghunathan & Pham, 1999;Varma, Denisi, & Peters, 1996), research in social cognition, neurobiology, and psychology also supports the notion that decision making requires an appropriate balance between cognition and emotion (Damasio, 1994;LeDoux, 1993LeDoux, , 1996Zillman, 1993). In fact, LeDoux (1996) contends that cognition contributes to emotional responses by giving us the ability to make choices about what kind of behavior is appropriate in any situation.…”

“…Kahn & Isen, 1993;Mano, 1990;see Ashby et al, 1999, for a review). Interpersonal emotional reactions have been found to influence performance appraisals (Robbins & DeNisi, 1994;Tsui & Barry, 1986;Varma et al, 1996), risky decision making (Moreno, Kida, & Smith, 2002), and negotiation performance (Allred, Mallozzi, Fusako, & Raia, 1997;O'Connor & Arnold, 2001;Pillutla & Murnighan, 1996).…”

Social ties and subjective performance evaluations: an empirical investigation

“…Brandts and Solà (2006) study the e¤ect of personal relations on distributive decisions and …nd discrimination against the subjects that are not personally known to the distributor. 1 The connection between the degree of acquaintance between rater and ratee or rating biases has also been discussed in the psychological literature (see for instance Cardy and Dobbins (1986), Varma et al (1996), or Lefkowitz (2000)). Most studies are either laboratory experiments with students or they lack objective measures of performance.…”

The Complementary Use of Experiments and Field Data to Evaluate Management Practices: The Case of Subjective Performance Evaluations

“…Lenient ratings will also more likely prevent conflicts with subordinates (Varma et al, 1996). On the other hand, the social preferences of a supervisor may also affect the scope for relational contracts if supervisors and subordinates interact repeatedly (see Dur and Tichem (forthcoming) for a formal analysis of the role of a supervisor's altruism but also potential spitefulness in relational contracting under subjective evaluations).…”