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Keywords Feedback, Management development, Performance appraisal
Abstract Although research on multisource ratings indicates that different rater sources provide different information, little research has investigated how ratees attend to such information. Understanding how ratees attend to feedback information from different rater sources is important because such attention likely impacts subsequent behavior. Using a policy-capturing design, managers (n = 213) completed scenarios in which supervisor, peer, and subordinate ratings were varied across different performance dimensions. Results indicated that ratees attended to all three rater sources, with supervisor ratings being attended to more than peer or subordinate ratings. Further, results indicated a significant interaction between rater source and performance dimension such that some rater sources were attended to more, for certain dimensions, than for others.
Multisource rating systems, often referred to as 360-degree feedback systems, are commonplace in organizations today (London and Smither, 1995; Walker and Smither, 1999) and continue to grow in popularity (Church and Bracken, 1997; Yammarino and Atwater, 1997). Unlike traditional performance appraisal systems in which only supervisors provide performance feedback to an employee, multisource rating systems collect performance information from multiple relevant viewpoints (e.g. subordinates, peers, and supervisors). Such feedback systems assume that, by increasing the number of rater sources, the amount of relevant information available to ratees also increases (Borman, 1997; Murphy and Cleveland, 1995). Although multisource feedback systems provide ratees with more information, little research has demonstrated that ratees desire, or more importantly, attend to and use, information provided by these different rater sources. As such, the incremental value of providing ratees feedback information from several different rater sources in unknown (Borman, 1997; Brutus et aL, 1999). The current study uses a policy-capturing design to assess to which rater sources ratees attend, and whether the importance of a rater source differs as a function of the performance dimensions one is being rated on. A policy-capturing design allows factors (i.e. cues) to be manipulated in order to assess the relative importance of each factor on a participant's subsequent decision or judgment.
Overview of multisource feedback systems
Multisource rating systems gather performance information about a target employee from two or more rater sources (e.g. peers, subordinates, customers). Multisource rating systems primarily have been used for managerial development, however, increasingly these systems are...