The issue of self-assessment is of great importance in Human Resource Management practices and procedures. Self-assessment is regarded by managers as importance practice of developing professional and loyal employees with high solid capacities for learning, training and creating human capital. Self-assessment is highly reflexive practice and is particularly crucial for those enterprises that practice autonomous and deregulated personal and team-work. Therefore self-assessment is needed for creating necessary self-management possibilities for the work in order to make him more responsible and his performance more effective. But the problems occur with the validity and accurateness of self-assessment, though we must provide the analysis of various factors embedded in the process of self-assessment.
The main obstacles to accurate self-assessment are its subjective character and intentional misinformation or misinterpretation. The first one is sometimes even more important that objective techniques of performance assessment and the second must be resolved in order to create necessary conditions for learning and enhancing employees’ performance. Each of these obstacles must be dealt with separately in order to analyze the issues of self-assessment and find out the way of increasing its accurateness (George, Smith 1990, 123).
The most frequent questions that are posed during the process of self-assessment may vary from organization to organization but the most general list of them may be presented as follows:
- Identification of key performance issues in organization
- Description of employee’s tasks and responsibilities vis-a-vis these goals
- Description of the current position.
- Diagnostics of employee’s performance in relation to environment, motivation and capacity.
- Prescription of changes and maintenance.
The subjectivity may contaminate self-assessment in some of these categories.
First of all, what concerns formal issues such as responsibilities and companies goals employees show general understanding but, of course, there are many exceptions. So, these formal parameters are not the matter of subjective dispositions (Statt 2000, 23). The problem of subjectivity occurs in such issues as diagnosis of employees’ performance, motivation assessment and propositions for changes in the organizational policies and practices. What concerns the assessment of performance many workers tend to make their performance variables lower and in contrary higher, which depends on the subjective relation of employee to his working conditions. This can occur unintentionally. The creating of person-day analysis worksheets in this cast can’t be regarded as resolution of the problem, because the variables that are listed in such assessment instruments represent only facts and results, but fail to provide with employees’ personal attitude to his level of performance (Hughes, Love 1994, 128). Thus, other approach should be elaborated. Another issue concerns wrong or self-constrained evaluation of motivation and proposition of changes in environment and organization.
This can often occur if there is no confidential climate between management and employees. Thus, subjective problems may be resolved through enhancing top-down communication between managers and workers through organization of feedbacks, creating possibilities to express employee’s views without fear of being penalized or fired (Katzenbach, 2000, 265). Besides these Human Resource managers must conduct the analysis of employees’ performance by developing their own performance appraisal techniques in the view of having two relevant sources of information which provides with possibility to compare employees’ attitudes with those of the manager or supervisor.
Apart from subjective limitations of self-assessment there exist such practices as deliberate misinformation of the management. This problem can be resolved through already mentioned tool of parallel performance assessment and also with the help of special tool – stakeholder assessment, which provides HR managers with possibility to assess employees’ dispositions and subjective interests (Mcgoldrick, Stewart, Watson 2002, 35). This is crucial to understand the sources of employees’ conduct and negative practices. Moreover, the practice of creating confidential relations must be realized in this case.
To sum it up, we see that the problems with self-assessment exist but can be easily resolved if taking scientific approach to HRM as a main principle.
References
- George, D.I., Smith, M. C., 1990, An Empirical Comparison of Self-Assessment and Organizational Assessment in Personnel Selection, Public Personnel Management, Vol. 19.
- Statt, D. A. 2000, Using Psychology in Management Training: The Psychological Foundations of Management Skills, Routledge, London.
- Hughes F. V, Love, K. G. 1994, Assessment Ratings and Written Test Score: Implications for Law Enforcement Promotional Systems, Public Personnel Management, Vol. 23.
- Katzenbach, J.R. 2000, Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees, Harvard Business School Press Boston, MA.
- Mcgoldrick J., Stewart J., Watson S., 2002, Understanding Human Resource Development: A Research-Based Approach. Routledge, London.