I am a student of a leading business school in India and we have the best in class professors to teach us things. Currently I am studying an important subject for organization, i.e. Human Resource Management. While studying that, I came across one topic called “Appraisal”.
I have been an employee of one of the major IT Service Company in India. During my working time, I went through my appraisals. And at that time I heard a new term, “Curve Fitting” for appraisals. I think this was one of the way companies are doing appraisals and this may not apply to other sectors.
The process of appraisal was something like this. Initially person has to do “self appraisal” and then his assessor will do his appraisal and give him a rating. Reviewer will also confirm it. We were given 5 point grade according to our performance in previous year.
Now interesting thing comes here is after everything is done and results are sent to HR person for rest of the things, HR person changes the rating. And that change is obviously on the negative side. The reason was given as it was because of curve fitting and due to that everybody’s grade might get affected. At that time I did not take care of these things as I was getting top rating and also was into lot of work. But now while studying things about HR management, now I am getting what was happening.
Let us go to the basics first. Now in the image below, you can see three types of distributions.
- Normal - Where maximum density is in the middle and low at the ends
- Positively Skewed - where more density is at the left hand side and low on right hand side
- Negatively Skewed - where more density is at the right hand side and low on left hand side
Now in the normal distribution, as we can see from appraisal point of view, maximum (around 60%) people will be at the middle. That means maximum people will be having average performance and few (around 10%) will get higher grade.
So companies will try to fit the performance grades of employees in to this curve by changing the grade of the people. By changing the grade, they made most of the employees “average” employees.
If we see from company’s point of view, it wants to have best employees and wants them to perform better. Also they want to retain only those people who have above average performance (if not all, most of them).
Then, my question is, why they give less while expecting more? Isn't it fair to have a negatively skewed curve than normal curve when more people are performing better? In that case good performers will get more. But they are not doing this; and the only reason I could get is, they want to maximize their profit (for growth and other things) even though that profit has come by the hard work of the employees only.
Now you have to decide whether it is right or wrong. You are free to put your comments.
Nice efforts Sanket.!!
ReplyDelete"Isn't it fair to have a negatively skewed curve than normal curve when more people are performing better?"
If we take your concept that more people are performing better then you are right that actual curve would be negatively skewed but this will add to their problem of selecting few people from all these good people. If you see from companies perspective then as they want best employees so i think they should try to fit it to positively skewed graph rather that normal. As positively skewed distribution is characterised by many outliers in the upper region or right tail so this will beneficial for the companies to recognise those few best that are really outstanding.
In short I mean to say that true curve is negatively skewed but for companies requirement they have to actually modify it to positively skewed for their own requirement but due to difficulty in such high modification companies prefer going for norml distribution. So they are right too..!!
NITIE
Nice insight to one of tghe worst ways of 'apraising' people.. I wanted to write a post why 'Appraisal' should be called 'Deppraisal' in stead.. they give you all the reason why you dont deserve to have the grade/rating which you deserve and show all the negative points in yourself.. this is not actually appraising.. but depressing I would say..
ReplyDeleteComing to the point.. I also agree the the above commenting person about keeping the curve as Positive one if you want your best to get the best.. and moreover, I would say that in an idea situation.. there shouldnt be any curve criteria and everyone should get what they actually deserve rather than decidin if they 'fit into the curve' or not.. but alas! the idea world exists in dreams and fentacies only..
Nice post buddy.. keep them coming.. great to see you surfacing on Blogosphere.. keep floating!
Happy Blogging!!!