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Douglas McGregor was one of the early critics of performance appraisal. In his uneasy look at performance appraisal, it was suggested that managers intensely dislike this responsibility and often feel incapable of evaluating subordinates. His recommendation was for managers to jettison this responsibility by having subordinates evaluate themselves through an MBO format. This arti cle contends that while McGregor was correct in describing performance appraisal as an uneasy relationship between supervisors and subordinates, he was off target in terms of why this is the case. Instead of disliking the evaluation function, this article reports results of a study which sug gest managers like performance appraisal because it gives them greater control over their subor dinates. Supervisors as a group tend to reflect attitudinal characteristics suggestive of greater dominance, control, aggressiveness, and competitiveness in contrast to non-supervisory employees. Hence, supervisors often support merit pay plans for "power" as opposed to productivity reasons, and are frequently willing to tolerate considerable problems in such evaluation systems. Rank and file employees tend to view merit pay plans as biased, unfair, and unrelated to individual produc tivity. As a consequence, managenal support for performance appraisal — for reasons of super visory control, is likely to exacerbate discord between supervisors and subordinates. Even though it has been found that many performance appraisal systems do not work, managers simply dislike giving up a source of control. These opposing tendencies are likely to lead to continued problems in the implementation of merit pay in the public sector.

This article addresses the issue of public sector motivation. Essentially, do public sector employees elicit different motives regarding their work expectations in contrast to people working in the private sector? For instance, do public sector employees have a higher need to serve the public and a lower need for monetary rewards? This article explores the conceptual and theoretical basis for public sector motivation and then reports the results of a small empirical study that tests hypotheses derived from these constructs. Our findings suggest that if public sector motivation does exist, that its effect on employee behavior and attitudes toward work expectations and personal goals is negligible at best.

This article attempts to demonstrate that the score an employee receives on his or her performance appraisal can influence attitudes toward general management, organization change, and fairness of evaluation instruments. Employees who score well tend to be positive toward management and supportive of the evaluation process, whereas average to low scorers are more cynical toward management and feel the evaluation process is unfair. Thus, performance appraisal scores can alienate exactly those employees who most need to improve. Instead of trying harder, average to low scorers rationalize why they are right and the raters wrong. This hardens their attitude toward the organization and can lead to lower performance. Hence, good employees tend to continue doing well and average to poor employees can become worse. For this reason, performance appraisal, even though it is handled objectively, can lead to a Matthew Effect. In general, employees don't like hearing bad news, even if it is correct.