ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have presented discussions of numerous lab and field studies that I’ve conducted over the years with my various colleagues. There is a lot of information here as I attempted to describe, sometimes in considerable detail, the design and results of these various studies. But, although the results of any one study may make a contribution, it is time to step back a bit and look at the bigger picture. What contributions can be cited that follow, not from an individual study, but from this whole program of research? As background to this, it is important to remember that the entire cognitive approach to performance appraisal began as a reaction to years of studies that, for the most part, considered the rater as simply a messenger in the process. Certainly there were studies of rater training which tried to make raters “better raters,” but these mostly concentrated on elimination of rating errors and, as Bernardin and his associates (Bernardin, 1978, 1979; Bernardin & Buckley, 1981) have noted, most of them simply substituted one response set for another, but nobody really noticed. With Landy and Farr’s (1980) paper, and the subsequent models of the appraisal process, including ours, scholars were saying that we had ignored the role of the rater in the appraisal process. Raters were not just messengers, they were active gatherers and processors of information, who imposed their own feelings and schemata upon the performance information available to them. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, the cognitive approach and the research I have described here have helped to change the way we considered the rater in the process. As I will discuss below, it has resulted in a new recognition of the importance of thinking about raters as active decision makers, a new view of rater training, and new ideas about accuracy and rating errors. Furthermore, with the intersection of research on cognitive processes, and research on rater affective and political processes, we have come to appreciate more fully the complexity of the decision making process in performance appraisal.
