performance

Few office workers seem to like performance reviews, those annual examinations of how well workers are doing their jobs. And many seem to outright hate – or fear – them. A 2015 survey of Fortune 1000 companies found that nearly two-thirds of employees were dissatisfied with performance reviews, didn’t think they were relevant to their jobs – or both. In a separate survey conducted in 2016, a quarter of men and nearly a fifth of women reported crying as a result of a bad review. The figures were even higher for younger workers. And that was during the much simpler pre-pandemic times, when pretty much all professional workers were in the office daily and could be assessed similarly. Things are trickier today, as some employees work entirely from home, others come to the office and still ot...

Managers may mistreat employees who perform poorly because they assume it results from a lack of diligence rather than other factors, according to research we published in September 2021. Surveys show that about 1 in 7 U.S. workers feel that their manager engages in hostile behaviors toward them. Abusive supervision may range from relatively mild behaviors such as lying or not giving credit for work to more severe actions, such as insults or ridicule. While past research has suggested that it’s the poor performance of workers provoking managers’ abusive reactions, we wanted to examine whether the faulty perception of the supervisor deserves at least some of the blame. So we conducted two studies, drawing on research showing that people are prone to perceptual errors when judging negativ...

Tag: performance

Given The Challenges Of Supervising Remote Workers – How To Make Performance Reviews Less Terrible

For Poor Performance Abusive Bosses Often Blame A Worker’s Lack Of Effort Or Care When It’s Their Own Biases That May Be The Problem