Performance evaluation in a dynamic context: A laboratory study of the impact of a prior commitment to the ratee.

A dynamic view of performance evaluation is proposed that argues that raterswho are provided with negative performance data on a previously promotedemployee will subsequently evaluate the employee more positively if they, ratherthan their predecessors, made the earlier promotion decision. A total of 298business majors participated in the study. The experimental group made a pro-motion decision by choosing among three candidates, whereas the control groupwas told that the decision had been made by someone else. Both groups evaluatedthe promoted employee's performance after reviewing 2 years of data. The hy-pothesized escalation of commitment effect was observed in that the experimentalgroup consistently evaluated the employee more favorably, provided larger re-wards, and made more optimistic projections of future performance than did thecontrol group.After a long history of attempting to identifyoptimal performance appraisal instruments andtechniques (cf. Landy & Farr, 1980), recent re-search has moved towards studies that describethe processes involved in making a judgmentabout performance (Borman, 1975; Feldman,1981; Schneier, 1977; Zedeck & Kafry, 1977).This article represents this latter paradigm andspecifically addresses the dynamic processes thatoccur within a rater across multiple judgments ofthe same ratee. It is concerned with a longitudinalview of the rating process in order to focus onjudgmental demands associated with rating thesame ratee at multiple points in time. This articlepresents: (a) a brief review of the trend towardsunderstanding rating processes, (b) presentationof a longitudinal viewpoint, (c) development ofa set of hypotheses from this new viewpoint, and(d) discussion of the results of the empirical testof these hypotheses.The traditional view of performance evaluationassumes that a rater has both a complete set ofinformation about the behavior of the ratee andan organizationally provided performance ap-praisal instrument. The instrument provides the