Performance Appraisal as a Guide for Training and Development: A Research Note on the Iowa Performance Evaluation System

• Author: Dennis Daley
• DOI: 10.1177/009102608301200204
• Published date: 01 June 1983
• Date: 01 June 1983

Performance Appraisal as

a

Guide

for Training and Development:

A

Research

Note

on the

Iowa Performance Evaluation System

by

Dennis Daley

Iowa

State

University

T

his paper examines one facet of performance appraisal—its use as a guide for the

drafting

of employee training and development plans. The scope is limited in that it

. I

excludes any consideration as to whether these plans are actually implemented. Our

interest focuses only on the extent to which supervisors endeavor to

assist

employees in cor-

recting or overcoming weaknesses and in enhancing or developing perceived strengths. The

findings

reported

here are based on a 1981 monitoring of the performance appraisal system

used by the State of Iowa.

As

civil service reform has been instituted in one jurisdiction after another in order to

further

assure objective, performance-based personnel practices, performance appraisal has

emerged

as one of the key

issues

in the personnel management of the

1980s.

This heightened

sense of importance and seriousness has, in turn, led to a renewed interest in the study of

the actual workings of performance appraisal systems.

The

uses

to which performance appraisal can be put are myriad. The recent Civil Service

Reform

Act of 1978 serves as a model in

this

respect. Here we find enunciated what may be

taken as the typical orientation toward the

uses

of performance appraisal, recommending

that personnel managers and supervisors "use the results of

performance

appraisal as a basis

for

training, rewarding, reassigning, promoting, reducing in grade, retaining, and removing

employees."

Performance appraisal systems can also serve to validate personnel

testing

and

selection

procedures, although such systems are themselves also subject to affirmative action

validation requirements.

The

economic recessions of the

1970s

and

1980s

have placed significant restraints on these

uses, however. The imposition of hiring freezes, the diminishment of promotional oppor-

tunities, the advent of reductions-in-force, and the near abandonment of merit pay provisions

by

financially strapped governmental

entities

have contributed to the loss of enthusiasm for

performance

appraisal in many quarters. Under such circumstances, performance apprai-

sal—limited in its use to the more negative functions of employee evaluation—takes on the

dreaded

image ascribed to them by Douglas

McGregor

(1957).

In

their search to salvage something positive from amidst these circumstances personnel

specialists

have alighted upon the use of performance appraisal as a guide for employee

training and development. This offers them the opportunity of providing public employees

with a service that employees view as beneficial. Although public employees have shown lit-

tle confidence in specific performance appraisal systems or in the managerial abilities of

those responsible for their implementation

(McGregor,

1957; Levinson, 1976; Nalbandian,

1981),

they have tended to demonstrate a more favorable attitude when the purpose of per-

Public Personnel Management Journal 159