The poverty of performance appraisal

The assessment of job performance is one of the most vexed problems of organisational administration. It is a problem perennially avoided by managers, yet it is one which will not go away. Without some indicators of achievement, we are told, accountability for the deployment and use of resources becomes a mockery, and organisational control is rendered impossible. Yet for one or more persons to sit in judgment on the job performance of another is, to say the least, distasteful to some, and indeed inimical and deeply offensive to not a few. PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL, as it is called, is thus a paradox. The logic of efficiency demands it, but equally strongly the logic of sentiment rejects it as unacceptable. What, then, is to be done?