Study On Effects Of Subjective Measures And Perceptions Of Politics On Justice Perceptions In Performance Appraisals

As an important part of enterprise competitiveness, the staff in functional departments give an impetus to achieve the strategic goal. How to motivate them to show high performance behaviors which are conducive to the organization is a major concern of the modern enterprise. The justice perception of performance appraisal influences employee’s moods, attitudes and behaviors in the organization, improving which will help to motivate them to produce high performance behaviors. The characteristics of performance measures are the factors which influence the perceived justice. According to job characteristics of the staff in functional departments, the proper use of subjective performance measures promotes the validity of performance measures, while the raters’ subjective judgments in performance appraisal will produce raters’ errors. The use of subjective performance measures gives the raters more chances to use their discretion, so studying the effects of subjective performance measures on the different dimensions of justice perception in performance appraisal is a purpose of this research. Meanwhile, the limitation of organizational resource and diversity of the interest subjects make appraisal politics popular in the organization. The raters will use their right to achieve their self-serving ends, and in order to pursue high performance ratings, the ratees will take some strategies to influence the raters. Accordingly, studying the influence of ratees’ perception of appraisal politics-raters and appraisal politics-co-worker on justice perception in performance appraisal is another purpose of this research. What’s more, the relationship between properties of performance appraisal measures and the justice perception tends to be affected by contextual factors, so this research also tests the interaction effect of subjective measures and ratees’ perception of appraisal politics-raters on the justice perception in performance appraisal.After reviewing the relevant literatures and finding out the problems not been resolved, this study constructs the theoretical model of the effects of subjective performance measures and perceptions of appraisal politics on justice perceptions in performance appraisal, and using a longitudinal data of 401 employees in functional departments of our country, this study tests the research model. The result shows that:within the acceptable range, the weight of subjective performance measures has a positive effect on ratees’ perception justice of the system significantly, while has a negative effect on ratees’ perception justice of raters and ratings significantly; Ratees’ perception of appraisal politics-rater and appraisal politics-co-worker both significantly negatively influence ratees’ perception justice of raters and ratings significantly; the weight of subjective measures and ratees’ perception of appraisal politics-raters has a negative interaction effect on ratees’ perception justice of raters and ratings significantly too. At last, this study discusses the way to set the weight of subjective performance measures and how to implement performance appraisal in functional departments.