Wednesday, 2 March 2011

Against performance reviews

Good op-ed in the New York Times today on the argument that ending collective bargaining will ensure fairer pay, because better employees would be able to be paid more. Samuel Culbert of UCLA says that's nonsense, because the "merit" that merit-based pay is based on comes from assessment by performance review:
In my years studying such reviews, I’ve learned that they are subjective evaluations that measure how “comfortable” a boss is with an employee, not how much an employee contributes to overall results. They are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations. They almost guarantee that the owners — whether they be taxpayers or shareholders — will get less bang for their buck.
My Quaker skepticism of competition makes me suspicious of merit pay as a concept for very similar reasons to this - who exactly decides what constitutes merit? And on what authority? Surely "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a much fairer way of doing things - and easier to get right, too!

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