Discussions / Homework Week of 8/2

Response # 1

As the title implies, the article “Why Most Performance Evaluations are Biased, and How to Fix Them” by Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, JoAnne Wehner, and Shelly J. Correll, imparts some solid advice. Nishiura, et. al, researchers at the Stanford VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab, conducted studies of performance review procedures at three U.S. companies. These studies revealed patterns of ambiguity in evaluations for women. Research has shown that ambiguity or vagueness in procedure leads to implicit bias on performance reviews. It turns out that the most problematic area filled out on a performance assessment was the “open box” area where a manager can write the answer to an open-ended question like “Describe the ways the employee’s performance met your expectations.” The authors report that ambiguous questions like that often illicit a biased answer. The reasoning is that since there are no clearly established parameters in which to judge if the employee met expectations, managers fall back on their perceptions of the employee’s gender, race or other identity information to answer the question. Nishiura, et. al, offer several solutions to “constrain” the open box. They recommend creating a checklist to refer to when filling in boxes. That way, managers are consistently using the same criteria for all of their employees. Another key suggestion was for managers to establish a rubric by which employees will be evaluated by before the performance review. This ensures that the manager is basing their evaluation on actual evidence, not subjective feelings. Overall, this article is invaluable to anyone who is working. Afterall, every one of us will be evaluated and some of us will also be providing evaluations. As a side note, several of the managers written about in the article were relieved to finally have some structure and uniformity in the review process because they wanted to be fair but didn’t know how to. This piece provides an expanded lens in which to see how one of Alison Wynn’s six stages of the “employee life-cycle” in the “The Gender Policy Report” has a domino effect on what comes after performance reviews – Pay, Promotion and Termination Decisions, the crux of inequality issues for women and underrepresented groups.

Response # 2

I think company leaders would benefit most from reading Alison Wynn’s “The Gender Policy Report”. Wynn, a Research Associate at the Stanford VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab, puts forward several meaningful strategies for handling inequality in the workplace. Ms. Wynn has surely been successful in catching the eye of company executives when she states, “It may be easier to think of individualistic solutions—such as training ourselves to think differently and change our own behavior—or to blame larger societal forces we can’t control, rather than to change the intricate organizational procedures and practices that contribute to employment outcomes in complex ways. However, my research suggests that we must address organizational forms of inequality as well.” In this sentence, the author goes out of her way to include statements that reflect how executives she examined in a year-long case study understood what constituted inequality in an organization. It most likely will cause executives’ interest to be piqued and to wonder what Wynn’s suggestions are because they mistakenly thought they were already doing everything they could to reduce inequality.