Stability of Rater Leniency: Three Studies.

Impact of rater personality on transformational and transactional leadership ratings

“…Although it was beyond the scope of this study to isolate specific mechanisms for rater disagreement (Kane et al, 1995), two of the three possible mechanisms we focused on (i.e., differential notice and recall of leadership behaviors and true differences in leader behavior) lead to similar conclusions for aggregation of leadership ratings across followers and for measurement error corrections. Considered from a measurement standpoint, our results suggest that not all disagreement in leadership ratings is random, and that unique rater variance may not always be an error.…”

“…With respect to individual differences as potential sources of systematic rating bias, results have generally been null or inconsistent with respect to race (e.g., Pulakos, White, Oppler, & Borman, 1989;Sackett, DuBois, & Noe, 1991), sex (e.g., Elmore & LaPointe, 1975;Martell, 1999;Sackett et al, 1991), age (e.g., Klores, 1996;Mandell, 1956), and education (e.g., Cascio & Valenzi, 1977;Sackett et al, 1991), but there have been calls (e.g., Kane, Bernardin, Villanova, & Peyrefitte, 1995) for a closer examination of personality in leniency biases. Borman and Hallam (1991) found the tendency to be critical to be negatively related to leniency; Bartells and Doverspike (1997) linked sensitivity and warm-heartedness to rating leniency; and Bernardin, Cooke, and Villanova (2000) linked the Big Five personality traits to rating leniency.…”

Conscientiousness and agreeableness as predictors of rating leniency.

“…For example, Kane et al, (1995) found a mean stability coefficient of .48 across three studies. Villanova et al (1993) reported a mean stability coefficient of .63 for students evaluating their peers on group projects.…”

Optimal contracts for lenient supervisors

“…Still, a contract paying the supervisor a fixed wage and not Rotemberg (2004Rotemberg ( , 2007 or Sliwka (2007) for similar specifications. 6 See, for example, Guilford (1954) or Kane et al (1995). 7 Most of the literature on alternative preferences assumes the parties' preferences to be common knowledge and so does not consider the problem we address.…”