Curzi Ylenia, Fabbri Tommaso, Scapolan Anna Chiara, Boscolo Stefano
Marco Biagi Department of Economics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
Department of Communication and Economics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jul 17;10:1659. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01659. eCollection 2019.
In digital competitive environments, organizations' ability to innovate is more than ever the key to competitive advantage. One way to cope with this increased pressure for innovation is to capitalize on employees' ability to generate new ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services, and work processes. Individual innovation thus emerges as a key competence required from workers, in turn crucially affecting the way managers make employees contribute to organizational goals and assess their performance. This study draws on the process-based approach to HRM (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004) suggesting that HRM practices may have a signaling effect, to address the following research question: which specific characteristics of performance appraisal are more likely to be perceived as promoting individual innovation at work? To address this issue, we carried out a survey on 865 employees working in large, multinational firms operating in digitalized sectors or industries with the potential to become digitalized. We collected data on the main characteristics of the performance appraisal systems adopted by the firm where respondents work, as perceived by employees themselves. We gathered also data on the respondents' overall perception that performance appraisal boosts innovative work behavior (IWB). Then, we employed logit analysis to test the relationship between data on performance appraisal systems and data on the effectiveness of performance appraisal as a booster of IWB. Our results reveal that, as compared to informal feedback, formal performance appraisal is more likely to reduce the perception that performance appraisal promotes individual innovation and creativity at work. In addition, we found that in the employees' perception performance appraisal focused on the achievement of pre-set, quantitative outcomes is more likely to affect positively IWB than appraisal focused on pre-defined skills that employees exhibited performing their work. However, performance assessment focused on the new competences developed by the employees has a perceived positive impact even stronger than result-oriented appraisal. Taken together, these results contribute to advance our understanding of how organizations should evaluate employees in the digitalization era.
在数字竞争环境中，组织的创新能力比以往任何时候都更是竞争优势的关键。应对这种日益增加的创新压力的一种方法是利用员工产生新想法的能力，并将这些想法用作开发新的、更好的产品、服务和工作流程的基石。因此，个体创新成为员工所需的一项关键能力，这反过来又对管理者促使员工为组织目标做出贡献以及评估员工绩效的方式产生至关重要的影响。本研究借鉴基于过程的人力资源管理方法（鲍文和奥斯特罗夫，2004年），该方法表明人力资源管理实践可能具有信号传递作用，以解决以下研究问题：绩效评估的哪些具体特征更有可能被视为促进工作中的个体创新？为解决这个问题，我们对865名在数字化部门或有潜力实现数字化的行业中运营的大型跨国公司工作的员工进行了一项调查。我们收集了员工自己所感知的其所在公司采用的绩效评估系统的主要特征的数据。我们还收集了关于受访者对绩效评估促进创新工作行为（IWB）的总体看法的数据。然后，我们采用逻辑回归分析来检验绩效评估系统数据与绩效评估作为IWB促进因素的有效性数据之间的关系。我们的结果表明，与非正式反馈相比，正式绩效评估更有可能降低人们认为绩效评估能促进工作中的个体创新和创造力的看法。此外，我们发现，在员工的认知中，侧重于实现预先设定的定量成果的绩效评估比侧重于员工在工作中展现的预先定义技能的评估更有可能对IWB产生积极影响。然而，侧重于员工所发展的新能力的绩效评估所产生的感知积极影响甚至比注重结果的评估更强。综上所述，这些结果有助于增进我们对组织在数字化时代应如何评估员工的理解。
