Performance appraisal in the age of TQM

Performance evaluation is often used as a tool to determine salary adjustment as well as an opportunity to improve job performance. When inappropriately applied, performance evaluations may be perceived as being unfair, wasteful, and demeaning. In some organizations, there has been a trend to break down job functions to their most detailed level, weight each activity, judge it, and then add up all the invalid numbers to achieve a more invalid judgment of a person's performance. This non-Gestalt evaluation is an inspection philosophy that has not served manufacturing or health care very effectively. Over the past four years, we have evolved a performance evaluation process at Minneapolis Children's Medical Center for physicians in both patient care and management roles. In this article, we will describe the evolution to the present system and discuss its dovetailing with customer service-driven continuous quality improvement efforts and our plans to improve the process.