Relationships between Attitudes Toward Organizations and Performance Appraisal Systems and Rating Behavior

Data collected in seven separate samples in three countries (the USA, Canada and Israel) were used to examine the relationships between perceptions of one's organization (climate, commitment), beliefs about appraisal systems (self-efficacy, uses of appraisal) and raters' orientations to appraisal systems (confidence and comfort) and specific rating behaviors. We obtained good fits for structural models suggesting that attitudes and beliefs accounted for substantial variance in raters' likelihood of giving high or low ratings, willingness to discriminate good from poor performers, and willingness to discriminate among various aspects of job performance when completing actual performance ratings. Proximal attitudes and beliefs (i.e., those directly related to the performance appraisal system) appear to have stronger links to rating behavior than do more distal attitudes (i.e., attitudes toward the organization in general).