Subjective Performance Evaluations and Employee Careers

Anders Frederiksen (afr@btech.au.dk), Fabian Lange and Ben Kriechel

No 6373, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Firms commonly use supervisor ratings to evaluate employees when objective performance measures are unavailable. Supervisor ratings are subjective and data containing supervisor ratings typically stem from individual firm level data sets. For both these reasons, doubts persist on how useful such data are for evaluating theories in personnel economics and whether findings from such data generalize to the labor force at large. In this paper, we examine personnel data from six large companies and establish how subjective ratings, interpreted as ordinal rankings of employees within narrowly defined peer-groups, correlate with objective career outcomes. We find many similarities across firms in how subjective ratings correlate with earnings, base pay, bonuses, promotions, demotions, separations, quits and dismissals and cautiously propose these as empirical regularities.

Keywords: employee careers; personnel data; subjective performance ratings; career outcomes; incentives; employer learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Forthcoming - published in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2017, 134, 408-429

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Journal Article: Subjective performance evaluations and employee careers (2017)
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