Testing and Assessment (Essay Sample)

Testing and Assessment
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Performance appraisal is the methodological evaluation of the performance of the employees to get a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the employee that you could use to the advantage of the industry or company. Performance appraisal is carried out in several ways that include: 1. Comparing the employees’ pay or salary with the targets set by the company. 2. Analyzing the factors contributing to the performance of the employees at work, for example, the environment. 3. Offering guidance to the employees for improved performances. In many companies, the performance appraisal results are used, either directly or indirectly, to ascertain the amount of reward the employees might receive. Therefore, the assessment results are used to recognize the high performers who are eligible to better pay and bonuses and also identify poorer performers who might need motivation or counseling to improve their overall performance (Flynn, 2008). Though many might support application of performance appraisal to any organization, opinions might differ when and where to apply such as there are those who believe it helps improve the performance of individuals but would not like it to be linked to any rewards or bonuses while others believe the contrary.  There are instances where the use of productivity alone cannot measure an employees' job performance. Such cases require incorporation of behavioral observation to be able to evaluate their performance. It involves the use of a behavioral observation scale that usually record whether a given employee engages in a particular behavior and if so, the frequency of his/her involvement. There is a set standard of the expected behavior to which the results from the behavioral observation scale are compared (Daley, 1992). Evaluation is then done to ensure that the employee meets the minimum expectations or to ascertain the need for a disciplinary action if it deems fit. A common aspect of most performance appraisals is the personality test that is mainly done through the execution of the Big Five theory of personality. It provides a basis for the determination of a person or employee overall personality and is composed of five primary traits: Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Extroversion which can be abbreviated as OCEAN (Cohen, 2013). Openness refers to the gratitude for experience or curiosity and being ready to learn fresh ideas a fellow employee may have. Openness involves being creative, imaginative and insightful. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, refers to the aptness towards reliability and being organized. It shows the zeal to achieve a set goal or limit that is often preferred in many organizations. Extraversion shows the person’s assertiveness and social character; they could act as a source of motivation to other colleagues thus improve the motivation limit of the employees he/she may interact with. Agreeableness is a desired trait by most heads as they are more cooperative and friendly with those they interact with. Neuroticism refers to one’s degree of emotional stability especially when faced with negative emotions (Cohen, 2013). Employees that score highly on neuroticism are usually emotionally unstable with traits of being moody and very tense which is not desirable if high productivity is the set goal. Therefore, the Big Five personality theory gives you the expected reaction when faced with different situations that may help you choose your eventual profession. The meta-analysis is a useful technique for checking the credibility of a performance appraisal for a given employee. It is a statistical method that incorporates combining and evaluating the results of many individual performance appraisals. This will help the supervisor or employer get the trend of the employee’s performance and even get some relationships if there exist any (G.A., 2004). A meta-analysis comes handy if a certain performance has been attributed to a number of factors thus will help get the trend and the relationships between these contributing factors and the end results. The meta-analysis combines many smaller performance appraisals from which the employer can identify trends which otherwise would not have been visible in the individual assessments. The meta-analysis usually provides answers to three fundamental questions: 1. The central tendency: the main purpose of a meta-analysis is to provide the relationship between the variables involved and the performance of the employee 2. Variability: Meta-analysis attempts to describe the degree of variability of the employees’ performance of a specified period. 3. Predictability: if there is variability in the employees’ performance then meta-analysis scans for the moderating insights that would help us understand the variability. Caroll’s three stratum theory is a cognitive theory that attempts to explain...