• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Biology

A biased evaluation of employees’ performance can be useful for employers

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
December 10, 2020
in Biology, Decision-making/Problem Solving, Personal, Personality/Attitude, Social/Behavioral Science
Reading Time: 3 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

IMAGE

Credit: Sergey Stepanov (HSE University)

In assessing an employee’s performance, employers often listen to his immediate supervisor or colleagues, and these opinions can be highly subjective. Sergey Stepanov, an economist from HSE University, has shown that biased evaluations can actually benefit employers. An article substantiating this finding was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

The model described in the article ‘Biased Performance Evaluation in A Model of Career Concerns: Incentives versus Ex-Post Optimality’ was developed within the ‘career concerns’ framework pioneered by Bengt Holmström. His paper represents the relationship between an employee (often called an agent by economists) and an employer, or principal (broadly speaking, this can be the market as a whole). This modelling considers three components of performance: talent, effort and random factors. An agent’s incentive to exert effort arises from the fact that better performance results in a higher evaluation of the agent’s talent by the market, which, in turn, can help to increase his future wage.

In the canonical model, an employer (or the market) observes the results of an agent’s work. Sergey Stepanov, Assistant Professor of HSE University’s Faculty of Economic Sciences, modified the model by adding an intermediate party – an evaluator. If the principal is busy or has many employees, it would be difficult for her to monitor each agent individually, and thus she will often rely on the evaluation of an agent by his supervisor or peers. For a variety of reasons, their assessments are likely to be biased, either in favour of the agent or against. With this in mind, the question the researcher sought to answer in this study was: ‘what should the best direction and degree of the bias be?’

‘In classic career concerns models, the principal observes the performance of an agent directly. However, we know that this is often not the case, and principals receive such information through ‘evaluators’. However, the interests of these people may not coincide with those of the principal. And I thought: maybe it’s actually a good thing that they don’t? Objective evaluation is, of course, optimal from the point of view of making correct decisions about an agent (e.g., to promote him or not), but such an evaluation may create sub-optimal incentives to exert effort,’ the author of the article explained.

Agents who are very talented a priori will lose motivation if they are evaluated fairly, because they know they will most likely clear the performance bar even with a low effort. Similarly, agents who are initially believed to be below average will lose motivation because they are unlikely to succeed even with a high effort. Hence, an ideal evaluator should be stricter on employees who seem to be capable and talented, but more lenient towards those who are less capable. In addition, the greater the degree of career concerns of an agent, the less objective the optimal evaluator should be, while the performance of those whose abilities are initially very uncertain, for example, without a prior track record, should be judged most objectively.

Thus, the ‘unfair’ opinion of an evaluator may prove to be more useful in motivating an employee than an objective assessment.

The model may be useful, for example, for organizing internships. This proves that stronger interns with good CVs should indeed be given more demanding supervisors, whereas those for applicants with very brief CVs (which tell very little about their experience of skills) should be more balanced in their assessments.

The results of this research will be useful in evaluating the performance of government officials working on public projects or senior corporate managers, as well as in making internal promotion decisions.

###

Media Contact
Liudmila Mezentseva
[email protected]

Original Source

https://www.hse.ru/en/news/research/423851321.html

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.09.024

A biased evaluation of employees’ performance can be useful for employers

Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Australian painted lady (Vanessa kershawi)

Protected areas fail to safeguard more than 75% of global insect species

February 1, 2023
Discovery of feather mite species from the Laysan Albatross, Phoebastria immutabilis.

Feather mite species related to the Laysan albatross discovered in Japan

February 1, 2023

Redox Medicine Society celebrates 25 years of excellence and success

February 1, 2023

Ancient fossils shed new light on evolution of sea worm

February 1, 2023
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Jean du Terrail, Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Owkin

    Nature Medicine publishes breakthrough Owkin research on the first ever use of federated learning to train deep learning models on multiple hospitals’ histopathology data

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • First made-in-Singapore antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) approved to enter clinical trials

    58 shares
    Share 23 Tweet 15
  • Metal-free batteries raise hope for more sustainable and economical grids

    41 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • One-pot reaction creates versatile building block for bioactive molecules

    37 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Boosting anti-cancer antibodies by reducing their grip

Protected areas fail to safeguard more than 75% of global insect species

Passive radiative cooling can now be controlled electrically

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 42 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In