Employee performance evaluation: a fuzzy approach

Purpose Managers encounter many decisions that require the simultaneous use of different types of data in their decision‐making process. A critical decision area for managers is the performance evaluation of personnel, whether individually or as a member of a team. Performance evaluation is critically essential for the effective management of the human resource of an organization and evaluation of staff that help develop individuals, improve organizational performance, and feed into business planning. Design/methodology/approach Performance evaluations require and often involve disparate types of information that are vague, incomplete, objective, and subjective. This paper proposes a performance evaluation system of employees considering various performance evaluation criteria using fuzzy logic. The main task in the proposed approach involves determining the performance indices of employees considering their respective performance in various qualitative and quantitative evaluation criteria and then selecting the best employee who holds highest performance index comparing all the indices. Findings A model is developed for any kind of organization where performance evaluation is significantly important for staff motivation, attitude and behavior development, communicating and aligning individual and organizational aims, and fostering positive relationships between management and staff. Fuzzy control is used to determine the overall performance index by combining results of the performance in selected criteria and provided it in numerical values which will undoubtedly ensure convenience of the concerned human resource personnel during performance rating calculation. Originality/value This is the first time, a performance evaluation model is developed using fuzzy approach for any kind of organization where performance evaluation is significantly important for staff motivation, attitude and behavior development, communicating and aligning individual and organizational aims, and fostering positive relationships between management and staff.