Dear Faculty and Fellow Ph.D. Students,

I cordially invite you to attend my dissertation defense scheduled for Wednesday, March 8th at 10:00 AM EST. The location will be Scheller College of Business, Room 312. For those wishing to virtually participate, the Zoom link is: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/99077243787.

The abstract is included below, and copies of the dissertation are available upon request.

Best Regards,

Chris Green 
PhD Candidate

Scheller College of Business

Suite 4307

m: (727) 465-3125

e: christopher.green@scheller.gatech.edu

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Area: Operations Management

Committee Members: Dr. Morvarid Rahmani (Chair), Dr. Karthik Ramachandran, Dr. Manpreet Hora, Dr. Andre Calmon, Dr. Onesung Steve Yoo (UCL)

Title: Employee Evaluation and Performance Management

Essay 1: Performance and Talent Management Considerations for the US Army. Organizations spend time to implement, evaluate, and refine performance management systems to achieve better business outcomes. As the United States Army undertakes steps to modernize its personnel administration process, we examine the role of performance management within organizations and how its effectiveness is shaped by the structural and environmental elements within. We explore the types of performance evaluation systems currently in use throughout the corporate landscape. Reviewing those systems from both academic and business perspectives, this essay offers several practical considerations for employing such systems in the US Army and proposes various avenues for future academic research.

Essay 2: The Implications of Rating Systems on Workforce Performance. Enhancing workforce performance is the key to success for professional firms. Firms often evaluate workers based on their performance compared to their peers or against an objective standard. Which of these rating systems leads to higher workforce performance? To answer this question, we construct game-theoretic models of two performance rating systems: (i) a Relative rating system where workers compete with each other for a constrained number of high ratings, and (ii) an Absolute rating system where workers are awarded high ratings by performing at or above a standard threshold. We derive the workers' equilibrium performance as a function of their ability and the characteristics of the rating pool. From a firm's perspective, we find that an Absolute rating system can lead to higher performance than a Relative rating system when the rating pool size is small or the workers' cost of effort relative to their efficiency rate is low, and the reverse holds true otherwise. When considering the workers' perspective, we find that higher ability workers prefer an Absolute system due to its predictable nature, while lower ability workers prefer a Relative system as it provides them an opportunity to outperform other workers.

Essay 3: Sequential Evaluation of Employee Performance: An Experimental Investigation.  Many firms employ competitive rating systems where supervisors can only award promotions or bonuses to a certain percentage of their subordinates. In many cases, such as the evaluation system in the U.S. Army, supervisors evaluate subordinates’ performances over time and in sequence (e.g., based on the employee's work anniversary). As such, supervisors are required to make decisions based on incomplete information due to the temporal nature of the evaluation process. In this paper, we study how managers react under such a sequential evaluation system. We construct a theoretical model of a sequential selection problem to generate the optimal solution. We then conduct a set of experimental studies and evaluate the impact of pool size on the accuracy of selection decisions when compared to optimal solutions. Despite theoretical increases in performance with larger pools, experimental performance did not yield an increase. Indeed, the average performance of subjects was the highest in the treatment that had the smallest pool size. We conduct multiple decision mechanism analyses to provide insights about the approaches subjects take and the nature of the behavioral traits leading to sub-optimal outcomes. Those comparisons suggest that the search fatigue mechanism may account for subjects' sub-optimal behavior across treatments.