WMBA 6201 Week 4 Rating Form Critique Example

Meets Expectations Until Eleven at Night: An Anchor-by-Anchor Critique of a Dealership's Inherited Service Advisor Rating Form, With the Behaviors That Fall Between Levels and One Dimension Rebuilt

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6201: Individual and Organizational Performance Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Meets Expectations Until Eleven at Night: An Anchor-by-Anchor Critique of a Dealership's Inherited Service Advisor Rating Form, With the Behaviors That Fall Between Levels and One Dimension Rebuilt

The Form

Cascade Ridge Auto, the invented Boise dealership from earlier weeks, rates its five service advisors once a year on a form the dealership adopted from its former owner's group more than a decade ago. Nobody now at the dealership designed it. Each of its five dimensions is scored from 1 to 5, and only three of the five points carry any description.

Table 1

The Inherited Form: Dimensions and Anchors

Anchors are quoted from the form; levels 2 and 4 have no description. The dealership is composite.

Anchor by Anchor

The critique works through the anchors rather than judging the form as a whole, because a form fails where a real behavior meets a vague description.

Customer focus, level 3: "treats customers well." The Week 3 job analysis observed an advisor who greeted customers warmly but promised a completion time without checking with the shop, so a customer missed a flight. That advisor treats customers well in the moment and fails them on the outcome. The form gives the supervisor no way to record the difference. Level 5, "customers love working with them," cannot be observed at all; the manufacturer's survey scores could be used, but the form does not mention them.

Sales ability, all levels. The anchors measure volume only. The Week 3 records showed that the advisor whose recommendations were approved most often also had the most comebacks. Under this form he rates 5. The form rewards exactly the pattern the Week 1 post identified as the gap between the dealership's stated and paid values.

Teamwork, level 3 versus 5: "works well with others" versus "a true team player." No behavior separates them. The coordination with the shop foreman that the analysis found takes forty minutes a shift is the most important teamwork in the job, and it is invisible here.

Dependability, level 5: "always goes above and beyond." That anchor describes discretionary effort, not dependability. An advisor who is never late and never misses a promised time, but leaves at closing, cannot reach 5. One who stays late but misses promised times might.

Product knowledge, level 3 versus 5: "knows the products" versus "expert." The job requires enough mechanical knowledge to explain a technician's findings, not expertise. Rating against "expert" favors the advisor who talks most technically to customers, which the analysis suggests confuses them.

The Missing Levels

Levels 2 and 4 have no anchors at all. In practice, the service manager reported, almost every advisor receives 3s and 4s, because a 4 feels like "better than average" without needing a reason, and a 2 feels like an accusation. When everyone rates between 3 and 4, the form cannot separate strong from weak performance.

Eleven at Night Before the Deadline

The decisive test of a rating form is what a tired supervisor does with it at eleven at night, with five forms due to human resources by morning. With this form, the supervisor fills in sales ability from the commission report, which is the one number at hand, and then rates the other four dimensions to match the overall impression that number creates. That is the halo effect in its most practical form. Pulakos and O'Leary (2011) traced the weakness of performance management less to flawed forms than to the conditions under which managers use them, and this form invites the shortcut.

One Dimension Rebuilt

Smith and Kendall (1963) developed behaviorally anchored rating scales, which describe specific behaviors at each level so that raters compare what they saw with concrete examples. The customer focus dimension, rebuilt from the job analysis's critical incidents, would read as follows.

Table 2

Customer Focus, Rebuilt With Behavioral Anchors

Anchors are drawn from observed incidents in the Week 3 job analysis.

Each level now describes something a supervisor could have seen on the service drive or in the phone log. A rating of 4 requires the supervisor to recall a specific update made before the customer asked, which is harder to give from impression alone.

Trying the Rebuilt Scale

Before recommending the change, the rebuilt customer focus scale was tried on two advisors using the Week 3 observation notes. Under the old form, both would have received a 4 on customer focus. Under the rebuilt scale, one rated 4, because the notes recorded updates made before customers asked, and the other rated 2, because the notes recorded realistic times quoted but no updates when work ran late. The difference had been invisible on the old form, which suggests the rebuilt anchors do what they are meant to do.

The trial also showed what the rebuilt scale costs: the rater needed the notes open beside the form, and each rating took about five minutes instead of one.

What the Critique Recommends

Rebuild all five dimensions with behavioral anchors drawn from the job analysis, replace "sales ability" with a dimension that pairs approval rates with comebacks, and require one written incident under every rating. DeNisi and Murphy (2017) observed that a century of research on rating formats produced only modest gains in accuracy, so the form is not a cure. But this form actively points raters toward the wrong evidence, and fixing that is worth doing.

References

DeNisi, A. S., & Murphy, K. R. (2017). Performance appraisal and performance management: 100 years of progress? Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 421-433. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000085

Pulakos, E. D., & O'Leary, R. S. (2011). Why is performance management broken? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 4(2), 146-164. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2011.01315.x

Smith, P. C., & Kendall, L. M. (1963). Retranslation of expectations: An approach to the construction of unambiguous anchors for rating scales. Journal of Applied Psychology, 47(2), 149-155. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047060