Achieving The Three Goals of Justice

While an increasing number of firms are scaling back on their use of performance evaluations, Facebook has decided to continue utilizing them. Their reason being that formally doing away with performance evaluations doesn’t stop the superiors from subconsciously assessing their subordinate’s performance and also deprives the employees of valuable feedback when they need it the most. Thus, Facebook is willing to make the necessary trade-offs to achieve the three goals of fairness, transparency and development associated with performance evaluations.

Fairness is the fairness of the process that leads to the outcomes (compensation). When fairness in process is fostered, employees become more accepting of undesirable decisions performance evaluations also provide transparency since they convey to the employees how valuable their contributions are to their employers which helps them gauge their position within the organization.

Increased transparency further fosters development since employees who are aware of their performance are better able to identify their capabilities as well as areas that need further strengthening.

By achieving these three goals in tandem, Facebook wishes to create a culture that recognizes both success and failures. Using your understanding of justice at workplace, explain how Facebook achieves the goal of fairness in its performance evaluations and why is that important to Facebook.  Trustworthiness, which can be defined as trust based on the rational assessment of an authority’s track record is of utmost importance to corporations because it affects not only their reputation, but also the relationships that they foster with their employees. Among other factors, the extent to which subordinates trust their supervisors determines how committed they are to their organization and as well as their job performance.

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Employers, who have an obvious interest in maximizing both these attributes can do so by utilizing organizational justice as a factor for increasing subordinates trust in supervisors and by extension in the organization. There are four different ways to foster organizational justice: distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational. The one that relates to Facebook’s performance evaluations is procedural justice. Procedural justice is the fairness of the decision-making process that leads to the allocation of outcomes. There are six different aspects to fostering procedural justice at workplace. Ensuring that employees can express their views and opinions, referred to as voice is one aspect. Facebook ensures that its employees have a say in the review process and gives them an opportunity to write evaluations about their peers which is subsequently shared with not only the managers, but their co-workers as well.

This also ensures employees representativeness in the process. Representativeness refers to the extent to which procedures reflect the concerns, values and outlooks of those individuals who are affected by them. Since the subject of these evaluations are the employees, representativeness in this context involves making sure that employees have an input. Facebook ensures that this is the case because managers incorporate employee contributions into their analysis. Moreover, managers at Facebook conduct employee evaluations collectively rather than in isolation. The purpose of doing so is two-fold. First, it helps Facebook suppress personal biases. By ensuring inputs from multiple sources, Facebook minimizes the impact that any one manager responsible for evaluating a particular employee would have on that employee’s evaluation.

The second purpose is that of accuracy group decision-making tends to be more accurate because they have access to greater resources and more complete information than individuals who only have themselves to rely on. Performance evaluations which are conducted for the purpose of making decisions regarding, pay raise, promotions, layoffs must be consistent. Inconsistency erodes an employee’s trust in the organization and leads to lower productivity as well as increased attrition. If managers arrive at similar results in their evaluation of two employees, then those employees should receive the same outcome Facebook ensures this by utilizing a predetermined equation that completely bypasses managers discretion in making decisions regarding compensation. Manager’s ratings only serve as inputs, not the outcomes that are ultimately distributed to employees. This ensures consistency between employees as well as across time.

Describe how perception biases might affect Facebook’s performance evaluations as well as its importance to the company. Bias represents a preference or prejudice for or against something. An observer’s bias within virtually affects every single aspect of their job and performance appraisals are no exception to this either. It is very important for an organization to be aware of these biases because our brains are hardwired to make assumptions, which can often be mistaken. The biases we have reflect the patterns our brain creates based on our past experiences that influence how we make decisions and understand the world around us. They are unconscious beliefs we hold about others that don’t necessarily align with our consciously declared beliefs. That makes them dangerous because they can surface without us even knowing about it.

There are different kinds of biases that can affect a manager’s appraisal of an employee. Selective perception occurs when we use selective thinking to look for things that confirms our beliefs and ignore or undervalue the relevance of those which contradict our beliefs. A manager who thinks highly of an employee because of in-group favoritism might be more willing to ignore that employee’s poor performance and attainment. Another bias that managers can struggle with is stereotyping. Stereotyping occurs when managers use an unconscious image of the type of person they believe will be good at a particular task. This negatively impacts performance appraisal because these unconscious images come from managers past observations of the people they have seen success over time in their roles. This can inhibit certain groups access to equal rewards and opportunities by influencing the manager’s perception of who’s the right fit for a task. As mentioned in the article, managers often describe women as being abrasive in their performance reviews perhaps because of their past observations of the gender groups.

Having seen men succeed more often in their roles than women, managers discount the latter from receiving equal opportunities and rewards which is why high achieving women are quickly struck down as being abrasive. Lastly, there’s projection bias. I believe that this bias is partly at cause for creating the idiosyncratic rater effect. This effect represents the idea that on average, 61% of a supervisors rating of the subordinates reflects the supervisor himself. The can be explained by the projection bias which reflects an authority’s belief that others have the same criteria as themselves and think, feel, believe and behave just as they do. If an authority believes that others have the same criteria as themselves and will react to decisions just like they would, then their evaluation of other people would closely follow that of their own self. And this poses a big problem to the organization because these procedures are used to make important decisions regarding an employee’s pay, promotion, training…etc.

If the method doesn’t even reflect the employees, if it claims to measure one thing but actually measures the other, then this makes the method inaccurate. There’s only an illusion of the method reflecting the people being rated. In reality, the ratings tell us a lot more about the rater himself than the rate. Using a theory of motivation, explain how Facebook’s decision to continue using performance evaluations can lead to higher satisfaction for their employees. According to the Job Characteristics Model, there are five core job attributes linked to three critical psychological states which together create job satisfaction. The fifth attribute is feedback which contributes to an employee’s knowledge of the results. Facebook’s decision to continue using performance evaluations relates to this fifth characteristic. Feedback is important because it determines the extent to which employees receive clear, detailed, and specific information on their performance, which enables them to better grasp the effectiveness of their work contributions and understand what needs to be corrected in order to increase their productivity.

At its core, feedback highlights the importance of giving direction to employees by exhibiting approval or disapproval of their behavior. A supervisor must give recognition to their subordinate’s action. If they don’t, it can lead employees to becoming demotivated and stop exhibiting their behavior all together. When employees are left in the dark about their performance, they can only guess as to whether they are on the right track or not. This lowers the confidence they have in their work which leads to lower satisfaction with the work itself Facebook’s performance evaluations serve to fulfill this feedback dimension because Facebook uses it to let its employees know how well they are doing with respect to their jobs. However, feedback within the context of job characteristics model involves more than just giving simple information about an employee’s job performance. Effective feedback involves providing information with the purpose of giving employees a better overall knowledge of their work effectiveness, the third psychological state in the job characteristics model.

And this ties in to the third goal of development that Facebook hopes to accomplish companies who abandon performance evaluations in favor of real-time feedback system often end up overwhelming their employees with too much information. While continuous dialogue and regular touchpoints between employees and managers provide faster resolution of issues when they are most needed, they fail to link real time feedback with the comprehensive image of an employee’s performance. The reason being that real-time feedback systems tend to focus more on micromanaging the employees to ensure they are best equipped to the situations they are currently facing. This shifts an employee’s focus away from their development and towards prioritizing their current situation performance evaluations helps bridge the gap between feedback and the big picture by giving managers an opportunity to discuss with employees their overall assessment of performance as well as what their long-term and professional goals which helps them focus on their development and ultimately achieve higher job satisfaction.