Hiring and Escalation Bias in Subjective Performance Evaluations: A Laboratory Experiment

Andrej Angelovski, Carles Solà and Jordi Brandts

No 839, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: In many organizations the measurement of job performance can not 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 four different treatments. For all four 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: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
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Related works:
Journal Article: Hiring and escalation bias in subjective performance evaluations: A laboratory experiment (2016)
Working Paper: Hiring and Escalation Bias in Subjective Performance Evaluations: A Laboratory Experiment (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:839

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