Employee-Supervisor Evaluation Agreement: A Test of Performance, Control, and Importance

159 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.This dissertation is an attempt to extend the research conducted by Bernardin and Villanova (in press). In their survey, employees cited the amount of control they have over the final performance and the relative importance of different performance dimensions as areas of conflict within performance evaluation. Traditionally, research on employee-supervisor evaluation agreement has focused predominantly on comparing their ratings of the employees' performance across multiple measures of performance. It is becoming clear that performance evaluation encompasses more than just the rating of performance level.The dissertation focuses on employee-supervisor evaluation agreement on issues that related to the appraisal of employee performance. Three issues are identified as theoretically important components of the evaluation process; the rating of absolute performance level (performance), employee control over achieved performance level (control), and the relative importance of multiple performance criteria (importance).Eighteen specific performance dimensions were drawn from interviews with employees and supervisors at the two data sites used in the study. These performance dimensions provided the basis for employee and supervisor ratings of performance, control, and importance. Results indicate significant multivariate differences between employees' and supervisors' ratings of control and importance, but not performance. The lack of significant results for performance may be due, in part, to the relatively high intercorrelation in these ratings.The roles of affect and job similarity are also presented in this study. Supervisors' affect toward their employees was found to be positively correlated with the ratings assigned to their employees and negatively correlated with employee-supervisor rating differences for performance and importance. Supervisor rated job similarity was negatively correlated with employee-supervisor rating differences on importance.A discussion is provided which reviews the results and considers their implications for research and practice. The specific issues of employee self-ratings, purpose for which the evaluation is performed, and the explicit inclusion of the control and importance evaluations in performance appraisal are discussed in detail.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD