Performance appraisal : how to improve its effectiveness

Formal performance appraisal has become a widespread instrument of human resource management. Performance appraisal is a measurement of how well someone performs job-relevant tasks. These measurements can serve different organisational purposes, but the most common goal is to improve or sustain performance levels by eliciting behavioural change. The underlying assumption with regard to this tool is thus that it is able to raise the performance of a whole organisation by raising the individual performance of each employee. But what became apparent is that in practice very often performance appraisal does not fulfil its promised benefits. Reason for this lack of effectiveness was found to be lacking support by the users of the system. It became clear that their acceptance and thus their perceptions of the performance appraisal determine if the money and time spend on development and implementation was good invested or just wasted