Revisiting Appraisal Politics from Assessors’ Perspective

Past research on performance appraisal focusing on assessor’s ability to assess accurately has not made much progress because practitioners have not adopted most of the recommendations. One of the arguments has been that enhancing assessor’s ability to is useless unless s/he intends to appraise accurately. The focus of this paper is to understand assessor’s intention to appraise performance and it draws from political view of organisation, which considers assessor as a politician and proposes that certain contextual factors cause assessor’s to adopt goals other than accuracy. Specifically, it is proposed that, instrumentality of outcomes, ambiguity in the process/ policies, and accountability pressures shape the assessor’s perception of appraisal politics, which determine assessor’s intention to achieve specific goals through appraisal. Accountability research reveals that only specific accountability conditions have favourable affect on decision. While procedural accountability reduces assessor’s perception of appraisal politics, the outcome accountability will increase this perception and affect appraisal accuracy.