One-hundred-thirteen empirical studies on performance appraisals, published
between 1980 and 1990 in business, communication, and psychology journals,
were reviewed and integrated. Results of this synthesis include the following:
Organizations use collaborative and traditional instruments to evaluate employ
ees, training of raters is essential, multiple raters are more effective than single
raters, interrater agreement is strong between peer and supervisory ratings, and
performance feedback is positively correlated with ratee job satisfaction. By
imposing Bolman and Deal's four-part organizational framework on perfor
mance-appraisal literature, it is possible to make recommendations for future
research that are human-resource and political-symbolic oriented. Recommen
dations call for more studies that investigate counterrational dimensions in
performance appraisal, interaction effects between rater and ratee characteris
tics, preferences of raters and ratees toward components in performance
appraisal, and communication transactions within the framework of the perfor
mance appraisal.
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