Rating Performance May Be Difficult, but It Is Also Necessary

The company I work for is one of the leading providers of performance management technology (Jones & Wang-Audia, 2013). This technology is used by more than 3,000 organizations worldwide, including several of the companies mentioned in Adler et al. (2016). The technology is highly configurable. It is currently being used to support performance management processes with no annual manager ratings, processes with traditional annual rating evaluations, processes that only evaluate competencies, processes that only evaluate goal accomplishment, processes that mix goals and competencies, processes that require forced-ranked comparisons between employees, processes that make no direct comparisons between employees, and much more. The capabilities of this and other human resources (HR) technology systems are allowing companies to radically rethink performance management because they enable companies to do things far differently from what was possible when they were constrained to more fixed electronic or paper forms (Hunt, 2011, 2015a). The result is an explosion in the diversity of approaches being taken toward performance management design.