Performance Appraisal Using Repertory Grid

 

Regular visitors to our Hints will have noticed that many of our hints emphasise the importance of seeing Repertory Grid as a conversation; the importance of feedback; and not collecting masses of data which you then don’t know how to analyse. So it might be useful to share with you some very simple, low-tech, cost-effective applications of Grid, and trust that you can extract the principles so that you can adapt the example if it’s appropriate.

Performance Appraisal

The request was: ‘Can you carry out some research to see whether our current performance appraisal system is measuring the appropriate attributes?’ It was clear that this was a ‘scoping’ study – they didn’t want answers to two decimal places, just enough to know whether they should do more research.

One of my strongly-held beliefs is that any attempt to define management skills should involve real managers as much as possible. I’ve seen too many projects go wrong for lack of management buy-in. So the project design was as follows: on five successive mornings we got different groups of between ten and twenty managers in a room with a long table for them to sit round; a big table for me at the top, with two flip-charts; and lots and lots of small index cards, placed in piles before the managers. The managers knew why they were there, of course.

Standing at the flip-chart, I introduced the idea of construct elicitation by writing up the names of three well-known people, asking the magic question ‘Tell me one or more ways in which two of them are like each other and different from the third,’ and writing the answers in the other chart. The experience of doing this allows the facilitator to make a number of points, such as: your constructs are your own, nobody else’s (this happens when someone else tries to provide the contrast pole); constructs are bipolar (you ask how they would describe the other element, by contrast - note that you never use the word opposite); there are different kinds of construct - propositional, behavioural, evaluative. That takes about fifteen minutes.

Getting the Elements

Then I asked them to take nine of the cards in front of them and to write the names, or nicknames, or initials, of three managers who were very effective; three at the other end; and three in the middle. I assured them that I didn’t want to see the cards and they’d be destroyed in a little while. Then they shuffled them and numbered them.

Getting the Constructs

Next I asked them to work individually, taking the element cards in groups of three, and writing one construct per card, describing the elements ‘in terms of how they behave at work’ or ‘in terms of their skills’. (Note that nine elements is a useful number because you can write three lines: 123, 456, 789 and ask them to go across, then down, and then diagonally; this ensures that every element gets seen in the company of every other element in the shortest possible time).

I patrolled, giving encouragement where necessary, patting the piles as they grew, settling questions. They managed pretty well; in about an hour and a quarter we had at least 20 constructs per manager and in many cases more.

Laddering and Content Analysis

I passed the bucket into which they could tear up the element cards and send them to the shredder. Then I collected all the construct cards and did a combination of laddering and content analysis, thus: I picked out a card – any card – and asked a laddering question about it. It could have been a ladder up: ‘Which pole is more effective, and why?’ or a ladder down: ‘How do you tell the difference between people who are X and people who are Y?’, but not both. As the process went along, I put the cards in piles depending on their theme, so that it was also a running content analysis. This allowed me from time to time to change tack and ask them if they had any comments on the relative sizes of the piles. We didn’t ladder every card, of course, because there were quite a few repeats, but I made sure that over the five days each theme had been visited at least twice.

By this time we had been working for three hours. Almost time to go: the last question, to everyone, was whether there was anything important about effective management here which we’d missed.

The Personnel Team's Task

That was what we did in the mornings. In the afternoons, the personnel team and I moved into a smaller room with a big table. On large cards we had already written the names of the attributes measured by the current appraisal system. The group’s task was to do another content analysis, thus: if the construct described a skill in the current system, it went on that pile. If it didn’t, we created a new pile.

The Results

The result was that we had three groups of descriptors. One group represented the skills which the current system used and which the managers themselves had used – which meant that they should probably stay in place. Then we had a group of descriptors which the current system used but the managers hadn’t – which prompted the question ‘Should the system use them, and if we agree that it should we’ll have to do a better job of defining them and helping managers use them’. And the third was the group of descriptors they used but the system didn’t – which prompted two questions: (i) are there any of these which we should incorporate into the system, and (ii) are there any of these which people are using and we’d much rather they didn’t – in which case we ought to think about eradicating them from managers’ frame of reference?

Five days work - plus one for report-writing. Transparent, robust methodology. Lots of managers who felt they’d been consulted, and so were more likely to accept changes. Personnel team knowing the results by heart and having learned something. Sweet and simple - we hope you agree.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

Sweet and Simple #2 - Conflict Resolution

Sweet and Simple #3 - The Repertory Grid Interview as Part of a Process

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