| Performance appraisal is one of the most heavily researched topics in human resource management, and employee reactions to appraisals are an important outcome of the appraisal process (some scholars and practitioners say the most important outcome), yet there has been a critical science-practice gap in this literature in that research has not produced a coherent understanding of why employees react in different ways to appraisals. In response to criticisms from the scholarly and practitioner communities both, research has shifted its focus to contextual aspects of the appraisal, and to employee reactions to appraisals. The context of performance appraisal and employee reactions to appraisals are highly interrelated, yet there has been no comprehensive review of the employee reaction literature, and no integrative framework exists with propositions about when and why contextual antecedents should be related to employee reactions.;The purpose of this dissertation is to provide such an integrative framework in order to organize the literature on employee reactions to performance appraisal, including mediating mechanisms whereby contextual antecedents are related to reactions, as well as potential moderators of the relationships between contextual antecedents and reactions. Organizational justice theory is used as an over-arching theoretical lens to develop hypotheses about these relationships. A related purpose is to test, using meta-analytic correlations and multivariate analyses with these meta-analytic correlations, some of the relationships articulated by this framework, as to guide future theory, research and practice related to performance management and appraisal.;Results indicated that social contextual variables (supervisor support, supervisor trust, supervisor satisfaction and supervisor-subordinate relationship quality) were all similarly related to appraisal reactions (at or around M r = .60); were most strongly related to perceptions of interactional justice (as compared to distributive and procedural justice); that relationships between social contextual variables and appraisal reactions were partially mediated by perceptions of organizational justice. Results also indicated that relationships between due process performance appraisal characteristics (adequate notice, fair hearing and judgment based on evidence) and appraisal reactions were mediated (fully or partially, depending on the antecedent) by perceptions of organizational justice. Performance appraisal rating favorability moderated the relationship between feedback frequency (an aspect of adequate notice) and appraisal reactions, but did not moderate the relationship between voice (instrumental and value-expressive) and appraisal reactions.;These results support key propositions of organizational justice and social exchange theory, as well as the due process model of performance appraisal developed by Folger Konovsky, & Cropanzano (1992). They indicate that employees react differentially to performance appraisals based on their perceptions of the fairness of the appraisal, in terms of different substantive aspects of organizational justice, and that it is important to consider rating favorability as a moderator of relationships between contextual antecedents and appraisal reactions. |
