Effects of rater goals on rating patterns: evidence from an experimental field study

The goal-based perspective of performance appraisals suggests that raters who pursue different goals give different performance ratings. Yet previous studies have not provided strong empirical evidence that there are different impacts of different goals on mean rating and discriminability, nor have they provided evidence of a goal-rating causality. The authors extend the literature by manipulating rater goals in the context of peer evaluations of graded group projects with a sample of 104 undergraduate students. They find that (a) pursuing a harmony goal increased mean rating and decreased discriminability, and (b) pursuing a fairness goal increased mean rating and decreased discriminability when the group projects had not ended and increased mean rating but did not change discriminability when the group projects had ended.