Danger of Peer Appraisal in Asia
Culture plays an important role in management, thus it is very unwise to simply copy a management tool from the West and implement in the East.
The West and East have very different ways of looking at things and managing things, and it is important people who need to work with people from different cultures need to be wary of this.
One of the tool introduced from the West is “Peer Appraisal”. The idea was good to allow another source of appraisal from the peers instead of one mainly from the top.
Peer Appraisal is common in the West, however, it has shown to have a very bad consequences in the East which I see as a phenomenon due to cultural difference.
I have observed this phenomenon for years, and yesterday while listening to some questions from young people of their struggles in the workplace, I find that my observation is correct.
In Asia’s workplace, the danger of using Peer Appraisal will often result in unproductive workers purging out the hardworking ones through the appraisal system. This is because the unproductive workers feel threatened by those who are better than them, and will tend to appraise a much bad score.
Once the HR goes through these appraisal, the hardworking workers will get discourage by the report and will quickly decide on resigning. Often bosses also do not understand why these productive workers decided to resign though the bosses saw their performance to be good.
So what would be a better appraisal system for Asian companies to adopt?
I would propose Performance Measurement, however, I would like to stress that Performance Measurement is NOT People Measurement.
Performance Measurement is focusing on the PROJECT and not on the people. A team that works on a project must be kept small, around three per small team will do. This will ensure all are actively working on the project. The project outputs and outcomes will be the benchmark, and Performance appraised.
The staff will also need to do a self-appraisal on their skills competency which they can share with their supervisor or manager. The supervisor or manager can then propose the course of development for them to increase their performance level which will be beneficial for future projects.
Using Performance Management strategy for the organisation, the abilities of the staff will only increase while seeing productivity improve.
However, I would like to stress again is that a common mistake made by organisation in adopting Performance management is that they turned it into People measurement.
People go through a process of self discovery all the time, and a supportive environment is conducive for growth and development. Once you see a staff not interested to learn and grow, normally such staff will not be able to perform in projects well, due to the many skills needed these days to tackle challenges.
Another thing that people need to be open-minded with concerning young people job-hopping. It is normal for young people to explore what career would be suitable for them, or the working environment that they find is conducive and growth potential.
Due to the education young people are receiving and the mass amount of information from the medias, they no longer work like a robot in which they simply follow instruction from the top. This is good since we get a thinking person who is working on something, instead of a “robot” because robots can be easily replaced by a real robot.
The ability to mobilise a group of thinking people to focus on a project and produce results is true leadership, not those kind of leadership using command and control, based on positional leadership.
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