The goal of focal articles in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice is to present new ideas or different takes on existing ideas and stimulate a conversation in the form of comment articles that extend the arguments in the focal article or that present new ideas stimulated by those articles. The two focal articles in this issue stimulated a wide range of reactions and a good deal of constructive input.

Despite years of research and practice, dissatisfaction with performance appraisal is at an all-time high. Organizations are contemplating changes to their performance management systems, the most controversial of which is whether to eliminate performance ratings. The pros and cons of retaining performance ratings were the subject of a lively, standing-room-only debate at the 2015 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology conference in Philadelphia (Adler, 2015). Given the high interest in this topic, this article recaps the points made by the panelists who participated in the debate. The arguments for eliminating ratings include these: (a) the disappointing interventions, (b) the disagreement when multiple raters evaluate the same performance, (c) the failure to develop adequate criteria for evaluating ratings, (d) the weak relationship between the performance of ratees and the ratings they receive, (e) the conflicting purposes of performance ratings in organizations, (f) the inconsistent effects of performance feedback on subsequent performance, and (g) the weak relationship between performance rating research and practice in organizations. The arguments for retaining ratings include (a) the recognition that changing the rating process is likely to have minimal effect on the performance management process as a whole, (b) performance is always evaluated in some manner, (c) “too hard” is no excuse for industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology, (d) ratings and differentiated evaluations have many merits for improving organizations, (e) artificial tradeoffs are driving organizations to inappropriately abandon ratings, (f) the alternatives to ratings may be worse, and (g) the better questions are these: How could performance ratings be improved, and are we conducting the entire performance management process properly? The article closes with questions organizational members have found useful for driving effective performance management reform.

The debate over eliminating performance ratings addresses many important theoretical and practical issues. However, the academic debate on the topic is disconnected from the concerns of practitioners. Knowledge gained from theory-driven research is not leading practice on the use of performance ratings, despite the large volume of potentially relevant research findings. Many organizations are charging ahead with performance management solutions that seem sensible to them. They may be interested in academic research, but they are not waiting for it. We will argue that academic researchers who hope to influence practice need to better understand the concerns of practitioners and the research opportunities that are presented by contemporary practice.

Colquitt, Murphy, and Ollander-Krane (Adler et al., 2016) argue that performance ratings are problematic in part because of the problems associated with feedback: Ratees dislike and dismiss performance feedback, raters are reluctant to provide tough feedback, and organizations do not enact research findings about improving feedback processes (Adler et al.). Discarding performance ratings on these grounds is effectively “throwing out the baby with the bath water,” given that we know quite a lot about how to improve the delivery and receptivity of feedback. Our commentary is intended to briefly illustrate ways to leverage research on feedback receptivity to improve performance management systems. Specifically, we focus on (a) cultivating supportive feedback environments, (b) integrating employee coaching into performance management systems, and (c) attending to the characteristics of feedback recipients to understand how they process feedback.

Amid the debate about getting rid of formal performance ratings, the practical implications for managers should be carefully considered. Adler et al. (2016) acknowledged some implications for managers who evaluate their subordinates with the traditional formal review. However, they do not fully explore the implications for managers when organizations trade formal performance reviews for frequent, less-formal performance conversations, which are a very popular alternative (Meinert, 2015; Rock & Jones, 2015; Wilkie, 2015). It is possible that organizations will benefit when formal performance reviews are removed; however, upon discussing this issue with a panel of human resources executives and organizational development practitioners, we were struck by their concern for how abandoning formalized review procedures would affect managers. This panel represented a wide array of industries (healthcare, retail, manufacturing, energy, academia, and the nonprofit sector), and their organizations used a variety of performance procedures, including formalized annual reviews and informal performance conversations. The goal of this commentary is to guide thinking, with the help of our practitioner-oriented panel, toward some of the obstacles managers may face in having to provide more frequent informal performance conversations.

As industrial–organizational (I-O) psychologists and longtime employees, we have developed and implemented appraisal systems and have been subjected to and have subjected others to appraisals. We have thus viewed performance appraisals from all angles, seeing the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. We believe that all of the points discussed by Adler et al. (2016) about retaining or eliminating performance ratings have merit and address the realities of the current state of affairs in performance appraisal practice and research. However, as Wiese and Buckley (1998) point out, organizations survived quite well for centuries without formal appraisal systems, which raises the question, “Why do formal performance appraisal systems exist?” One inescapable yet surprisingly undiscussed reason is that it is a legal and/or regulatory mandate for 4,185,000 U.S. federal government employees (Office of Personnel Management, 2015a). Eliminating performance ratings for these workers would literally require an act of Congress.

Dissatisfaction with performance appraisal is at an all-time high (Adler et al., 2016). In this commentary we argue that one of the reasons why performance appraisal is unable to get the most out of employees is the way in which employees are evaluated against a uniform set of criteria, leading to a focus on deficits and little attention for unique individual qualities and strengths. By comparing the performance of an employee with a set of predetermined criteria, and by expecting the employee to perform well across all these criteria, the performance appraisal tends to focus on those areas where employees perform below the norm, irrespective of how excellently they may perform in other areas. For many employees, this leads to the frustrating experience that there is more attention for their weaknesses than for the areas in which they excel. By focusing on employee strengths and on how to make optimal use of those strengths, and by allowing for diversity in the way that employees execute their jobs, the performance review can be replaced by a dialogue about development that may truly stimulate the motivation for performance improvement.

At the heart of the debate between Colquitt's and Adler's (Adler et al., 2016) camps is a disagreement about the degree to which employees can be expected to respond favorably to challenging, negative, or critical feedback. Colquitt and colleagues argue that we often try and avoid blame, select jobs that don't rate us against others, and respond unhappily to accurate appraisals. Adler and his collaborators, by contrast, are more optimistic. They point to how feedback drives us to seek new strategies, change our behavior, and improve our skills.

Research and practice in performance appraisal and performance management seem to suffer from the same “delusion of absolute performance” that Rosenzweig (2007, p. 112) described with respect to commentators’ evaluations of company performance in a competitive market economy. Commentators on business success factors have tended to speciously neglect or downplay the relative nature of performance (Rosenzweig, 2007). Downplaying the relative nature of performance is apparently the strategy endorsed by most performance appraisal scholars, too. Goffin, Jelley, Powell, and Johnston (2009) estimated that less than 4% of the published performance rating research has involved relative or social-comparative approaches, despite demonstrable advantages for relative over absolute rating formats (discussed below). Similarly, social comparison research and organizational scholarship have not traditionally been closely integrated (Buunk & Gibbons, 2007; Greenberg, Ashton-James, & Ashkanasy, 2007).

The company I work for is one of the leading providers of performance management technology (Jones & Wang-Audia, 2013). This technology is used by more than 3,000 organizations worldwide, including several of the companies mentioned in Adler et al. (2016). The technology is highly configurable. It is currently being used to support performance management processes with no annual manager ratings, processes with traditional annual rating evaluations, processes that only evaluate competencies, processes that only evaluate goal accomplishment, processes that mix goals and competencies, processes that require forced-ranked comparisons between employees, processes that make no direct comparisons between employees, and much more. The capabilities of this and other human resources (HR) technology systems are allowing companies to radically rethink performance management because they enable companies to do things far differently from what was possible when they were constrained to more fixed electronic or paper forms (Hunt, 2011, 2015a). The result is an explosion in the diversity of approaches being taken toward performance management design.

Adler et al. (2016) effectively discuss the shortcomings of performance ratings as well as performance management solutions. However, they leave out one important performance management solution from their review and discussion, the Productivity Measurement and Enhancement System (ProMES; Pritchard, 1990; Pritchard, Harrell, DiazGranados, & Guzman, 2008; Scaduto, Hunt, & Schmerling, 2015). We intend to respond to Adler et al. by explaining how ProMES could make up for some of the shortcomings described in performance ratings and performance management, as well as challenge the field to further consider this well-researched and established evidence based solution as a viable alternative.

Although the authors make strong arguments for both sides of the debate in “Getting Rid of Performance Ratings: Genius or Folly? A Debate,” we argue that performance appraisal reactions were largely overlooked beyond a few exceptions, where the authors either alluded to or explicitly mentioned reactions. For example, the authors explain that one reason organizations have eliminated the forced distribution approach is negative employee reactions. The authors also highlight the importance of managers using appropriate language when delivering performance appraisal ratings in order to improve employee reactions. Despite these exceptions, we believe it is necessary to call more attention to the critical role of ratee reactions in the performance appraisal process. Therefore, our commentary expands on the conversation sparked by Adler et al. (2016) by incorporating ratee reactions.

Recent commentary has suggested that performance management (PM) is fundamentally “broken,” with negative feelings from managers and employees toward the process at an all-time high (Pulakos, Hanson, Arad, & Moye, 2015; Pulakos & O'Leary, 2011). In response, some high-profile organizations have decided to eliminate performance ratings altogether as a solution to the growing disenchantment. Adler et al. (2016) offer arguments both in support of and against eliminating performance ratings in organizations. Although both sides of the debate in the focal article make some strong arguments both for and against utilizing performance ratings in organizations, we believe there continue to be misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and misinformation with respect to some of the measurement issues in PM. We offer the following commentary not to persuade readers to adopt one particular side over another but as a call to critically reconsider and reevaluate some of the assumptions underlying measurement issues in PM and to dispel some of the pervasive beliefs throughout the performance rating literature.

Performance evaluation has long been a source of dissatisfaction for practitioners and a focus of research for scholars. The current call for the elimination of performance ratings is not new. This commentary considers the quality perspective as a historical context in which performance ratings were, at best, considered a misguided management tool. Although the current debate doesn't seem to be philosophically based, it may be useful to recognize that serious questions regarding performance ratings have come up before. Potential measurement problems with performance ratings are considered. It is concluded that performance ratings are not the major problem for performance management. Possible sources of problems with performance management are considered. Directions for improvement are discussed.

As organizations become decentralized and work becomes team based, organizations are adopting performance management practices that integrate employees’ performance information from multiple perspectives (e.g., 360-degree performance ratings). Both arguments for and against the use of performance ratings presented in the focal article focused on rater agreement (or lack thereof) as evidence supporting the position that multisource ratings are a useful (or not a useful) approach to performance appraisal. In the argument for the use of multisource ratings, Adler, Campion, and Grubb (Adler et al., 2016) point out that multisource ratings are advantageous because they lead to increased interrater reliability in the ratings. Although Adler and colleagues were not explicit about why this would be true, proponents of multisource ratings often cite the measurement theory assumption that increasing the number of raters will yield more valid and reliable scores to the extent that there is any correlation in the ratings (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). In the argument against the use of multisource performance ratings, Colquitt, Murphy, and Ollander-Krane argued that because multisource ratings pool together ratings from raters who are systematically different in terms of their roles and perspectives about the target employee's performance, the increased number of raters is not expected to resolve the low level of interrater agreement that is typically observed in performance ratings (Viswesvaran, Ones, & Schmidt, 1996).

During the fall 2015 semester, I (i.e., the last author of this response) taught a doctoral seminar on performance appraisal. Although this course was a general survey of research and theory regarding work performance and performance appraisal processes and methods, we also talked extensively about the value of performance ratings to organizations, raters, and ratees. It was indeed serendipitous that this focal article came out when it did. As part of the final examination requirements (and, admittedly, as a pedagogical experiment), I asked the six PhD students in this course (i.e., the first six authors of this response) to read and respond to the Adler et al. (2016) debate regarding the relative merits of performance ratings. To highlight the perspectives of this next generation of industrial and organizational psychologists, I have collected here various representative comments offered by each of these emerging scholars on this issue.

Adler et al. (2016) open with a summary of the business case driving our field to change and close by providing principles for accomplishing that change, where they conclude that “there is no right answer to the ratings question” (p. 244). Lying between the opening and closing sections is a series of arguments for and against today's performance rating status quo, arguments illustrating just what happens when too many years are spent seeking answers along too narrow a path. In this commentary, we provide additional support for the strategy- and outcome-driven approach to performance management advocated in the article. In addition, we offer ideas for what has contributed to getting us and keeping us where we are. Unless we understand what has driven performance ratings research and practice to be the object of an intense and lengthy debate, these same forces may well drive us to carry out years-long experiments of questionable value along similarly narrow paths. We want to offer our views on how to foster outcome-based practice more broadly.

In their debate about whether companies should keep traditional, numerical ratings of employee performance in an ever-changing world of work, Colquitt and colleagues argued that performance ratings are too hard to do correctly, while Adler and colleagues (Adler et al., 2016) countered that “‘too hard’ is no excuse for I-O psychology.” I would like to build on this by suggesting that “too hard” is not only no excuse but also a complete dismissal of the central aspect of what our science seeks to achieve.

Adler et al. (2016) raise some controversial issues about whether performance rating systems should be eliminated or not. We strongly believe that the decision to do away with performance ratings is premature because more research needs to be done, as suggested by “the better questions” that Adler et al. listed at the end of the focal article. We propose that those questions can be extended further by testing them in other cultures and supplemented with these questions: When, how, and why do cultural values influence performance management? Given the nature of our increasingly diverse workforce in which employees with different cultural values work together within the same organization, it is crucial to identify and document the influence of culture on performance appraisal practices. In this commentary, we briefly summarize research to date on the influence of cultural values on performance management and identify some important future research directions.

In their focal article, Adler and his colleagues (2016) elaborate on the pros and cons of abolishing the performance appraisal process in organizations. Sherman-Garr (2014) contends that this trend is on the rise because both managers—the raters—and their subordinates—the ratees—disdain performance scores. Employees feel that performance ratings do not reflect their actual performance, and therefore they do not gain the rewards they merit. Conversely, their supervisors/managers experience a great deal of frustration because the improvement of employee performance does not match up to the excessive time and effort invested in the appraisal process, making the whole process ineffective and inefficient. We agree that performance appraisals, specifically the practice of assigning performance ratings, appear to be a disliked and ineffective human resource function. However, we do not agree that goal attainment should be used in place of performance ratings; rating format and rater training represent “disappointing interventions” and, most of all, only “weak” criteria exist for performance ratings.