Performance Appraisal and Innovative Behavior in the Digital Era

Abstract

In digital competitive environments, organizations’ ability to innovate is more than ever the key to competitive advantage. One way to cope with this increased pressure for innovation is to capitalize on employees’ ability to generate new ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services, and work processes. Individual innovation thus emerges as a key competence required from workers, in turn crucially affecting the way managers make employees contribute to organizational goals and assess their performance. This study draws on the process-based approach to HRM ( Bowen and Ostroff, 2004 ) suggesting that HRM practices may have a signaling effect, to address the following research question: which specific characteristics of performance appraisal are more likely to be perceived as promoting individual innovation at work? To address this issue, we carried out a survey on 865 employees working in large, multinational firms operating in digitalized sectors or industries with the potential to become digitalized. We collected data on the main characteristics of the performance appraisal systems adopted by the firm where respondents work, as perceived by employees themselves. We gathered also data on the respondents’ overall perception that performance appraisal boosts innovative work behavior (IWB). Then, we employed logit analysis to test the relationship between data on performance appraisal systems and data on the effectiveness of performance appraisal as a booster of IWB. Our results reveal that, as compared to informal feedback, formal performance appraisal is more likely to reduce the perception that performance appraisal promotes individual innovation and creativity at work. In addition, we found that in the employees’ perception performance appraisal focused on the achievement of pre-set, quantitative outcomes is more likely to affect positively IWB than appraisal focused on pre-defined skills that employees exhibited performing their work. However, performance assessment focused on the new competences developed by the employees has a perceived positive impact even stronger than result-oriented appraisal. Taken together, these results contribute to advance our understanding of how organizations should evaluate employees in the digitalization era.

Alignment of Perceived Competencies and Perceived Job Tasks among Primary Care Managers

“…A successful manager achieves important results for the organization by encouraging and leading the performance assessment. Therefore, regular monitoring and periodic assessment of the performance, creating a culture of the performance assessment, could help the managers understand if they were on the right way to improving their professionalism [38] and PHC outcomes [39].…”

“…Research evidence from this study could be useful for policy makers for the formulation of adequate frameworks for managerial performance assessment and for the identification of the needs for continued managerial education in order to provide competent PHC managers. Human resources development leaders should advocate investments in managerial competencies and should give much higher priority to management development [3][4][5]38,40]. Investment in the development of professional staff of quality managers and managerial teams is a key point for goal realization in PHC in Serbia, as well as in many other countries that are to meet the majority of an individual's health needs over the course of their life and leave no one in their community behind [3].…”

Study on methods for evaluating employees performance in the context of digitization

“…In the existent literature, latest focus is on electronic performance management systems, moreover of how automated and digitalized performance measurement may impact the efficiency of evaluation (Stone et al, 2015).Researchers considers that digitally transforming organizations need to adopt another strategy regarding their performance management systems, by changing their domain of interest on quantitatively results instead of traditional manner: never-ending working hours, overtime, pre-defined behavior. This way, the organization will show empathy on innovative work performance (Curzi, Fabbri, Scapolan, & Boscolo, 2019). In Table no.2 we can observe the advantages and the disadvantages of the evaluation based on objectives as a research based on the existing literature.…”

“…The evaluation based on objectives is considered more traditional than the 360-degree evaluation, because of the subjective opinion of the manager, who mostly establish the objectives of the employee. The biannual meeting is formal and lately, researchers observed that formality doesn't serve to a bigger understandability or transparency (Curzi et al, 2019). Moreover, formality fails to communicate what is decisive for the organization as they are too busy with the bureaucratic steps, tools and procedures of small meaning to employees and managers (Pulakos et al, 2015;Cappelli & Tavis, 2016).…”

Factors Affecting the Effectiveness of Employees’ Performance Appraisal in Private Hospitals in Malaysia

“…HR level) to ensure that the comments are not biased and to ensure that the sounds of appraises are taken into consideration. For instance, severely negative feedback is depleting the confidence of employees towards performance appraisal system and eventually reduces its effectiveness (Curzi et al, 2019;Deb, 2008). The final appraisal results are discussed with employees and are given chance to question any misinterpretation during the performance appraisal session.…”