Hiring and escalation bias in subjective performance evaluations: A laboratory experiment

Andrej Angelovski, Jordi Brandts and Carles Sola

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol. 121, issue C, 114-129

Abstract: In many organizations the measurement of job performance cannot rely on easily quantifiable information. In such cases, supervising managers often use subjective performance evaluations. We use laboratory experiments to study whether the way employees are assigned to a manager affects managers’ and co-employees’ subjective evaluations of employees. Employees can either be hired by the manager, explicitly not hired by him and nevertheless assigned to him or exogenously assigned to him. We present data from three different treatments. For all three treatments we find escalation bias by managers. Managers exhibit a positive bias towards those employees they have hired or a negative one towards those they have explicitly not hired. For three treatments we find that managers’ and employees’ biases are connected. Exogenously assigned employees are biased in favor of employees hired by the manager and against those explicitly not hired.

Keywords: Escalation bias; Hiring; Performance evaluations; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D83 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115002796
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Hiring and Escalation Bias in Subjective Performance Evaluations: A Laboratory Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Hiring and Escalation Bias in Subjective Performance Evaluations: A Laboratory Experiment (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:121:y:2016:i:c:p:114-129

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.10.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().