Fuzzy Driven Decision Support System for Enhanced Employee Performance Appraisal

Introduction

In standard organizations, performance as it relates to employee is basically perceived as the extent to which the member of staff contributes towards achieving organizational goals and objectives. Performance appraisal (PA) involves identifying and evaluating the performance of employees with the aim of effectively rewarding their efforts in order to motivate them towards incessant pursuit of organizational objectives (Samuel et al., 2014 and Bayo‐Moriones et al., 2017). Aside from compensation, PA has other important functions such as career planning, service quality assurance, employee motivation, and helping employees to position or reposition themselves in their organization. The concept of PA is equally viewed as the assessment of an individual’s performance in a systematic way which often represents a significant tool used for all round development of the employee and the organization. Terminologies such as performance assessment, performance evaluation, and performance management are also commonly used to describe PA. Appraisals are generally viewed to have positive influence on employees’ performance, but they also may have negative impact on motivation, role perceptions, and turnover when poorly designed and administered (Churchill, 1985). The performance of an employee in an organization is usually measured against factors such as job knowledge, quality and quantity of output, initiative, leadership abilities, supervision, dependability, co-operation, judgment, and versatility among others. In addition, at times behavioral and health status of employees are considered as they have been proved to affect job results. Therefore, the most controversial yet indispensable human resource tool that has drawn the attention of researchers and practitioners is undoubtedly PA (Murphy and Cleveland 1991; Andy et al., 2000). Effectively appraising the performance of employees constituted a core part of any corporate establishment since it determines the status of employees and provides the organization’s management with information on proper remuneration plan for its employees. In line with this, different methods have been proposed for appraising the performance of employees in an organization. Most of these methods have one form of limitation or the other when applied leading to appraisal results that are inconsistent, unreliable, and invalid (Huang, 2014; Keegan and Den Hartog, 2018). These inadequacies have undesirably affected the performance of employees in such organization and as well discouraged a number of them from properly carrying out their job functions. Another important point is that such ineffective appraisal methods might reduce the chances of attaining organizational objectives (Martin and Bartol, 1998). Based on these limitations, the development of an efficient decision support system for employees’ performance appraisal in an organization is of great significance. The above stated limitations associated with the conventional appraisal systems serve as the key motivating factors for this research.

It is worthy to note that appraisal of employees’ performances is a key part of managerial task that organizations need to perform at certain interval of time. As a result, effective management principles could provide a substantial base upon which adequate PA system could be built. Henri Fayol, a French industrialist proposed 14 core management principles which have been widely practiced across all forms of business enterprise (small, medium, and large-scale business enterprises) globally (Rodrigues, 2001). Also, these principles are found to exhibit certain characteristics that could be used to effectively evaluate the performance of the organization and its employees.