Due process in performance appraisal: a quasi-experiment in procedural justice

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1995  by M. Susan Taylor,  Kay B. Tracy,  Monika K. Renard,  J. Kline Harrison,  Stephen J. Carroll

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Future research is needed to examine the conditions under which the more powerful organizational members, such as supervisors, are willing to accept and support procedural justice interventions that constrain their ability to determine unilaterally the outcome of work disputes. Such knowledge will be very important to designers of organizational procedural justice systems. As Ury, Brett and Goldberg (1989: 74) stated, "Why should teachers participate in the design of a procedure that will make it easier for students to raise complaints about their grades? . . . Understandably, parties who are 'winning' with the current system may be unwilling to help change it." In this study, managers were willing to help change the system and came to prefer it over the previous system. As one manager put it, "I like the system and think it is a good one. It forces a manager to spend time giving employees the feedback they need and helps them to communicate needed changes in priorities and performance expectations. Initially, having to set expectations made my job harder but a lot of misunderstandings came out in our initial expectation setting meeting and clearing these up then made my job easier."

This research supports the viability of the due-process metaphor (Folger, Konovsky, and Cropanzano, 1992) as a mechanism for increasing the contribution of performance appraisal systems to organizational effectiveness. The system studied here increased perceived appraisal accuracy, decreased rating inflation, and generated favorable reactions from both managers and employees, despite requiring significantly more time and effort from them. These results are quite exciting, given that both research and practice suggest that favorable reactions to performance appraisal systems are rare. A due-process approach seems likely to facilitate the design of appraisal systems that more fully achieve their potential contributions to employee development, reward allocation, and legal documentation. Rather than elusive, the goal of designing an effective appraisal system could even be a realistic one.

Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Atlanta, 1993. The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of Angelo DeNisi, Mary Konovsky, Paul Hanges, and three anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of this manuscript.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Sheldon, and Marian Ruderman 1987 "The role of procedural and distributive justice in organizational behavior." Social Justice Research, 1: 117-198.

Banks, Christine G., and Kevin R. Murphy 1985 "Toward narrowing the research-practice gap in performance appraisal." Personnel Psychology, 38: 335-345

Bernardin, H. John, and Peter Villanova 1986 "Performance appraisal." In E. A. Locke (ed.), Generalizing from Laboratory to Field Settings: 43-62. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.

Bies, Robert J., and J. S. Moag 1986 "Interactional justice: Communication criteria of fairness." In R. J. Lewicki, B. H. Sheppard, and M. H. Bazerman (eds.), Research on Negotiations in Organizations, 1: 43-55. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.