KCI등재
The Effect of the Rater's Interpersonal Affect towards the Ratee on the Rater's Cognitive Processing of Performance Appraisal and Rating Accuracy
저자
Yoon, So-Yeon (senior researcher of the Research Institute for Human Behavior at Yonsei University) ; Lee, Hoon-Koo (professor of Yonsei University)
발행기관
Korean Social Science Research Council Korean National Commission for UNESCO
학술지명
Korean Social Science Journal(Korean Social Science Journal)
권호사항
발행연도
2001
작성언어
English
주제어
KDC
300.5
등재정보
KCI등재
자료형태
학술저널
수록면
21-61(41쪽)
제공처
The present study examined the biasing effect of the rater's interpersonal affect towards the ratee on the rater's evaluative information processing and performance evaluation. The study investigated whether the rater's affect towards the ratee bias his/her interpretation of the meaning of the ratee's performance, his/ her retrieval and recognition of the information about the ratee presented to the rater, and his/ her performance appraised, and whether such bias is caused by selective information processing between affect-consistent information and affect-inconsistent information. The results showed that although the rater was presented with the equal number of good and poor performances, having more positive affect towards the ratee than the negative, the rater appraised and interpreted an identical behavior more positively, and retrieved more good performances and less poor performances. The analysis on the differentiated processing of affect-consistent and affect-inconsistent information clearly revealed selective processing of affect-consistent information with rater's positive affect towards ratee. However, when the rater had negative affect towards the ratee, the selective processing of affect-consistent information did not occur.
The major functions of human resource management, such as promotion decision, rewards, human resources development and training, are performed on the basis of the performance appraisal(Garroll&Schneider, 1982). Since many decisions having significant influence on the members of the organizations are made by the results of performance appraisal, accurate appraisal is the key to fair treatment and equal opportunities to all employees, and furthermore, directly connected to the effectiveness of the organizations. The 'rating accuracy' refers to the degree to which a rater's evaluation represents the true performance level of the ratee(Caranikas, 1995). It is crucial for any organization to promote rating accuracy or validity in order to improve the quality of performance appraisal, the standard of major decisions (Cardy&Dobbins, 1994).
As interests in achieving more valid and accurate appraisal have increased, theorists have become more concerned with factors that determine appraisal accuracy and have focused mainly on development of measures that can minimize rater's error, development of training programs and statistic control technique against rating error, etc. however, it was pointed out that the psychometric approach, treating only the moment of appraisal, is not sufficient to explain appraisal error fully, since a rater's appraisal goes through several stages of cognitive processing before expressed in terms of a rating measure and error may interrupt in the middle of the process ( Landy & Farr, 1980; Landy&Zedeck, 1983; Bernardin&Beatty, 1984). In the early 1980, as a result, the focus of the performance appraisal study moved toward how a rater is led to the appraisal, that is, the cognitive processes of performance appraisal. From the cognitive perspective, the process of performance appraisal is a series of information processing, in which the information observed by a rater, with other previous information that the rater obtained regarding the ratee, is processed cognitively, leading to the final performance appraisal.
As the focus of the performance appraisal study transformed from the problems of measuring instruments and rating formats to psychological factors determining the appraisal process, major cognitive models have been developed and experimented with in the research on performance appraisal. However, these appraisal studies focused only on the conscious/controlled process, not on other psychological factors, which can be generated by the interactions between the rater and the ratee. In general, the performance appraisal evaluation performance of a retee is made every 6 months or a year. It is impossible for a rater to process all the information gathered during that period consciously and intentionally for the performance appraisal. In other words, it is necessary to examine both effects of automatic information process as well as controllable information processes in order to understand the process of performance appraisal and to improve the quality of appraisal, since bias at each stage of performance appraisal are caused by both controlled and automatic processing. In addition, as performance appraisal is taken under the situaion where a rater interests with a ratee, profound discussion on the influence of interpersonal factors on performance appraisal as well as the ratings of the actual ability or competency of an employee is needed (Guion, 1983; Borman, White, Pulakos, &Oppler, 1991).
Among many other psychological factors, a rater's affect toward a ratee is considered as an important factor that determines the accuracy of appraisal(Judge & Ferris, 1993; McGrath, 1984;Dipboye, 1985) because the affect factor is the important social factor and the effect of the affect is processed automatically(Smith & Lerner, 1986; Engle, 1996). Affect is processed with other information simultaneously because it is processed unconsciously or without extra cognitive efforts (Isen & Diamond, 1989; Srull & Wyer, 1989; Greenwald& Banaji, 1995). Since the bias produced by affect is unconscious, a rater may not realize the affect biasing the performance appraisal through cognitive information process involved. This happens because affective reaction preceding the appraisal is not always controllable and could happen whether we wanted it or not (Zajonc 1980). One important reason to consider a rater's affective reaction in performance appraisal is that the rater may be affected in the way of viewing the ratee, allocating attention to various information, and appraising him/her unconsciously. Finally, affect influences the performance information processes systematically. According to social cognitive research, affect may lead to a bias in the information process, acting as the cognitive filter of social perception(Srull & Wyer, 1989; Izard, 1991). Also, affect may operate to appreciate or depreciate the ratee's performance through both automatic and controlled modes of information processing (Park, Sims, & Motowidld, 1986). In other words, in addition to any intentional bias, the distraction caused by affect also leads to an unintentional bias in the evaluation process.
Here, affect needs a clear definition. Affect has various meanings in psychological research, and is used as a general term, including emotion, mood and feeling (Fiske & Taylor, 1984). The emphasis on affect and its influence on performance appraisal emerged from the two different streams of researches - differentiated affect and undifferentiated affect. The former sees affect as affective value of a specific target and defines it as an individuals affective reaction to a specific person or stimulus (Fiske, 1982; Zajonc, 1980). The differentiated affect to a specific person is called interpersonal affect (Park & Sims, 1989), measured in terms of liking and disliking of a person (Trost, Kinicki, & Prussia, 1989). The latter views affect as a mood state such as happiness and sadness, but not as the reaction to the specific targets (Clark & Isen, 1982; Fiske, 1981). The differentiated and undifferentiated affect is different in the way and the extent of which affection the processing of performance information. In general, interpersonal affect, the differentiated affect, persists over time, while mood, the undifferentiated affect, is short-lived (Clark& Isen, 1982). Because performance appraisal targets a particular stimulus person, the differentiated affect, the rater's like or dislike towards the person is expected to play a more crucial role in the process of performance appraisal than the undifferentiated affect, the mood state not associated with a particular person ( Cardy & Dobbins, 1994; Varma, DeNisi, & Peters,1996).
It was already found that the interpersonal affect biased the result of performance appraisal in many laboratory studies using various measurements and manipulations and field studies. Also, the recent study by Lefkowitz and Battista (1995) showed that a managers liking to his subordinate had a significant influence in performance appraisal and that it intensified over time. The study evidences the necessity to acknowledge and control systematic effect of interpersonal affect on performance appraisal. If interpersonal affect is the factor having a significant biasing effect on performance appraisal, the effect of interpersonal affect should be controlled. In order to do that, the process of how the effect of interpersonal affect is produced should be identified. However, studies that have dealt with these problems are very scarce.
The robust result obtained in the field of interpersonal affect is that when the ratees have a similar level of performance, a liked ratee receives a higher rating than that of a disliked ratee (cardy,1987; Williams, 1986; Park & Sims, 1989 ; Davis & Steiner, 1993 ; Robbins & DeNisi, 1994). Then, does interpersonal affect have an effect only on performance ratings? Or does it also affect the cognitive mechanism that is interpreting and encoding performance information, the memory of it and evaluation of the importance of discrete performance information? If in and evaluation of the importance of discrete performance information as the well as rating depend on a rater's affect to a ratee, is it due to discriminative processing of affect-consistent/inconsistent information?
Studies on schematic cognitive processing reveal that the occurrence of biased processing of schema-consistent information can be identified by testing the occurrence of a selective processing of schema-consistent information and of any bias in the interpretation of information presented (Bodenhausen, 1988). The former indicates a phenomenon that the information consistent to the activated categories is integrated more often to the rater's representation by memorizing and playing more attention to the information. The latter means an underestimation of the informative meaning of inconsistent information to performance appraisal by interpreting presented information as a consistent information with the activated category or by biasing the interpretation. The interpretation of information is related with encoding information, the stage that observed information forms a representation, including the decision of whether to accept and store observed information as meaningful or to ignore it. Accordingly, a ratee's behavior may or may not be accepted as the reference of performance appraisal, dependent on how a rater interprets the ratee's behavior she/he observed. Also, the more easily a performance is recalled, the more important the effect it has on the final performance appraisal, for a rater makes a judgment based on the performance recalled, not on all the performances exhibited.
If selective processing of affect-consistent information occurred due to the interpersonal affect, in the situation where a rater is given the equal number of good and poor performances of a ratee, he would recall and report to have observed or recognized more information consistent to his/her affect than an inconsistent one. Affect-inconsistent information would be recalled wrongly or show lower frequencies in recall. If interpersonal affect biased the interpretation of information presenter, when interpreting the level of performance result connoted in the information, affect-inconsistent information would be underestimated or re-interpreted to the direction of affect-consistency. Even with an identical level of performance, a rater could appraise quite differently according to his/her affect toward the ratees who manifested the behavior. For example, the behavior of a favored subordinate can be appraised as excellent, while that of the unfavorable as ordinary. If interpersonal affect had influence not only on appraisal but also on information processing for performance appraisal, it is necessary to investigate which cognitive process involved is influenced more by affect. In other words, is the information interpreted in a way that is consistent with the direction of a rater's affect when information is collected and encoded? Or, is affect-consistent information recalled more even though all the information is interpreted accurately? The investigation on the above questions gives the solution on which cognitive process should be targeted to reduce the bias effect of interpersonal affect.
This study examined the effect of a rater's interpersonal affect to a ratee on information processing of performance and appraisal accuracy. More specifically, first, it examined whether interpersonal affect systemically biased the information processing of performance, or the appraisal was biased to affect-consistent direction at the time of appraisal. Second, it tried to find out that of interpersonal affect biased a series of cognitive mechanism involved in the information processing and the bias were caused by differentiated processing of affect-consistent/inconsistent information. Third, it investigated the mechanisms which interpersonal affect gives the stronger influence among several cognitive mechanisms involved in information processing. Lastly, it examined that whether the rater's positive/negative affect toward the ratee influenced the pattern of differentiated processing of affect-consistent information. The hypotheses of the study are as follows.
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