THE IMPACT OF COMPUTERIZED PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND PRIOR PERFORMANCE KNOWLEDGE ON PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Despite claims that computerized performance monitoring (CPM) systems provide objective performance data and thus foster accurate employee e valuations, few research studies have examined the impact of CPM data on the performance appraisal process. A laboratory experiment was cond ucted to assess the impact of prior performance level on requests for computerized performance information, and the influence of both prior performance level and requested information on performance evaluation. Forty-four male and female undergraduates electronically monitored fo ur simulated employees whose prior performance was either high or low and whose performance during the monitoring period was either high or low. Results indicated that prior performance level and employee perfo rmance during the monitoring period independently influenced both curr ent and future performance ratings. Further, when the simulated employ ee performed at a level incongruent with her prior performance, subjec ts requested more data about the employee's performance, were less cer tain about their ratings of the employee's current and future performa nce, and rated the employee's current performance as more variable tha n when the employee performed at a level congruent with prior performa nce. These results indicate that use of CPM systems that allow on-line access to employee performance and that record requested information may increase performance evaluation accuracy by facilitating the imple mentation of search strategies best suited to specific appraisal tasks and minimizing memory-related biases. However, such systems may not e liminate the effects of attention/encoding biases.