Research On Performance Appraisal Of R&D Personnel In Enterprises

Technology innovation has become a key for building and keeping core competences throughout enterprise's growth, especially when the market competition is fierce as nowadays. As a main part of the technology innovation, the R&D personnel have been more and more highly valued by the entrepreneurs. Evaluating the R&D personnel in a scientific, reasonable and fair way is the focal point of the R&D management. However, to measure the R&D personnel's performance becomes one of the big headaches for the enterprises because of the job particularity. Therefore, a study on performance appraisal of R&D personnel not only enriches human resource management theories to some extent, but also has certain significance in reality.This article reviews related theories of performance appraisal first, then analyzes the situations that corporate R&D activities are currently in and points out major problems that exist in those activities; sums up the major methods used to evaluate R&D personnel performance and problems existed in those methods; brings forward the method of appraisal directed against the R&D personnel by using process-oriented management by objectives), that is, the R&D activities get transparentized and standardized by tightening up the administration of the processes. Meanwhile, the whole R&D process breaks down to relatively easy-to-observe and easy-to -scale phases. A series of appraisal indices could be set at every single observation point so that the R&D personnel could find out the gap between his/her own performance and the standards easily and take actions to make it up then. Corporate can also take measures accordingly to control the whole R&D process in a better way.The most crucial elements in performance appraisal are performance indices and appraisal methods that are guides to the employees and reflect the corporate value orientation in the meantime. As a point of departure from these two perspectives, this article breaks down the R&D process on the basis of the rules of its activities; designs a index system that is correspondent to different conditions of various phases and sets weights to these indices by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP); and takes advantage of a Fuzzy Comprehensive evaluation to appraise the performance.