Selection guidelines review
The selection guidelines on the website of Uniform Guidelines are meant to establish a single set of governing principles. The principles are crafted to help labor organizations, employers, licensing and certification boards and employment agencies to meet the Federal Law requirements. The Federal Law prohibits discriminative employment practices on the basis of color, race, religion, gender, sexuality and national origin. The guidelines are used to determine selection procedures such as proper utilization of tests. The guidelines are aimed at fostering equality in employment opportunities in the whole country. In the selection guidelines, there are adverse impacts and affirmative action details on those who do not fulfill these requirements. They provide a valid selection procedure than can help realize fair and just selection in employment for all citizens. The technical standards are also emphasized by these guidelines to ensure that the people hired are competent to hold those respective positions.
Ethical, legal and social issues
Organizations face various social, ethical and legal issues in their activities. Some of these activities include evaluating employee behavior as well as performance against predetermined standards. The process of developing measurement standards for evaluation faces similar issues.
Privacy
When developing a performance evaluation criterion for an organization, privacy becomes a paramount issue. Employees need to be assessed based on a criterion that emphasizes only on issues that affect the professional life of employees. Human behavior evaluation poses a threat to employees’ privacy because it focuses on their personal life and the reason why they behave the way they do. The criterion of evaluation must be designed in a manner that employee privacy will be respected. The people carrying out the evaluation process must also conduct it professionally to avoid causing privacy problems (Schultz & Schultz, 2005).
Bias
Criterion for measuring employee performance may at times be inclined towards some issues such as productivity or employee behavior. This leads to some employees getting poor results because their areas of weakness have been focused fully while their strengths neglected. Other employees will record very high performances in the evaluation simply because their strengths have been assessed while weaknesses were neglected. Therefore, the criterion to evaluate employee performance must be designed to focus equally on every aspect of employee behavior and performance (Schultz & Schultz, 2010).
Lack of transparency
One common ethical issue during the process of employee performance evaluation is the lack of transparency. It occurs both with supervisors and employees. In order to achieve accurate results, transparency is very important. However, there are some employees who could give false information or bribe their supervisors to get fairer evaluation than other employees. Supervisors carrying out the assessment process may also be inclined to favor some employees maybe because they have been bribed or they are friends. The criterion must develop methods of employee performance evaluation that do not allow for such loopholes because it leads to inaccurate outcomes (Schultz & Schultz, 2010).
Legal requirements
Employee performance evaluation and the criterion used are both guided by laws. These laws give employees the right to know the objective of the evaluation process and to have an influence on the results of the assessment. Employees are also required to cooperate with the employers during the assessment exercise. The criterion and the assessment procedure itself must be designed to adhere to all the legal requirements. This will give employees confidence about taking part in the exercise because they will be sure it is meant to improve their welfare and that of the organization (Schultz & Schultz, 2010).
Implications of the evaluation process
The organization must clearly define the advantages and demerits resulting from the outcomes of the assessment process on employees, the organization and all other stakeholders. The process must be done for valid reasons of improving employee performance and organizational productivity. Any negative implications on any stakeholder must be mitigated. This could be by encouraging positive impacts from the criterion development and evaluation process (Schultz & Schultz, 2010).
Lack of cooperation
When an employee evaluation process is about to b carried out, there are usually resentments from a section of the employees. At times, the employees are not sure of the objective of the whole process and some feel the mode of conducting it is not fair. In rare cases, the management may also not be in agreement about the method of evaluating performance. The organization management should agree on the most appropriate method of conducting the evaluation and convince employees about the intentions of conducting the process. This will clear way for easy and orderly employee performance and behavior evaluation (Schultz & Schultz, 2005).
Conflict of interest
This is a social as well as ethical issue. When the criterion for assessment of performance is formulated, there is a chance that conflicts may arise between non financial and financial aspects of the organization. The organization must decide the main interests that the evaluations will serve. The management must state their objectives clearly to avoid conflict f interest (Schultz & Schultz, 2010).
The legal, social and ethical issues in development of criterion and employee performance evaluation are focused in the following two articles. The first focuses on assessment of performance in health technology. The other one is about evaluating learners in e-learning institutions.
References
Biddle Consulting Group. (2011). Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. Retrieved August 17, 2012, from Uniform Guidelines: http://www.uniformguidelines.com/
Cambridge University Press. (2008, October). Guidance for considering ethical, legal, and social issues in health technology assessment: Application to genetic screening. Retrieved August 17, 2012, from International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2347128
Ozgan, S., & Koseler, R. (2009, Decenber). Multi-dimensional students’ evaluation of e-learning systems in the higher education context: An empirical investigation. Retrieved August 17, 2012, from Computers and Education: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131509001584
Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2010). Psychology and Work Today. An Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology. New York: Pearson Education.
Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2005). Theories of Personality (8, illustrated ed.). London: Cengage Learning.
