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A formal employee performance appraisal is regarded as one of the tools of human resources performance management. People, their knowledge and skills are currently considered to be the most valuable resource a company has. The article focuses on methods of employee performance appraisal in agricultural organizations in the Czech Republic. The first part of the article deals with the theoretical background of the term "formal appraisal" and employee performance appraisal methods as defined by Czech and foreign specialists. Further, the article describes, based on a questionnaire survey, employee performance appraisal methods that are considered important for the agricultural organizations in the Czech Republic. The aim of the article is to identify the current state of formal employee appraisal in a sample group of agricultural organizations and to test dependencies between selected qualitative characteristics. The outcomes show that the most commonly used methods of employee performance appraisal in agricultural organizations include predefined goal-based performance appraisal, predefined standard outcome-based performance appraisal and appraisal interviews. Agricultural organizations apply these methods in particular due to the fact that their findings are further utilized in other areas of human resource management, such as reward system and personnel planning. In statistical terms, dependency between the method of employee performance appraisal according to predefined goals applied by agricultural organizations and personnel planning (an area of human resources management) has been proven (p-value: 0.032, Phi coefficient: 4.578). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the upward evaluation of supervisors at the Arizona Health Sciences Library, exploring the benefits of employee feedback to their supervisors. It describes the annual performance appraisal process at the University of Arizona, the interdepartmental relationship between the medical library and the university's human resource department, and the employee satisfaction regarding their supervisor's skills in leadership, judgment, and communication. Other subjects under discussion include employee concerns about confidentiality, the use of web-based surveys to conduct upward evaluations, and the relationships between those in middle management and the executive directors.

We isolate and describe four key elements that distinguish different forms of forced distribution systems (FDS). These key elements are the consequences for low performers, differentiation of rewards for top performers, frequency of feedback, and comparison group size. We examine how these elements influence respondents’ attraction to FDS. Undergraduate students ( n = 163) completed a policy capturing study designed to determine how these four FDS elements influence their attraction to FDS. We examine the relative importance of these elements that most influence attraction to different FDS, as well as individual attributes (i.e., cognitive ability, gender, and major) that may affect those preferences. Respondents were most attracted to systems with less stringent treatment of low performers, high differentiation of rewards, frequent feedback and large comparison groups. Consequences for low performers were nearly twice as influential as any other element. Respondents with higher cognitive ability favored high reward differentiation and males were less affected by stringent consequences for low performers. Before practitioners implement FDS, it would be prudent to consider all four elements examined in this study—with the treatment of low performers being the most salient issue. Future accounts of FDS should clarify the nature of these elements when reporting on FDS. Such precision will be useful in generating a knowledge base on FDS. We add precision to the discussion of FDS by identifying four key elements. This is one of the first studies to examine perceptions of FDS from a ratee perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]