Ans: There are number of reasons why raters may decide to distort ratings. In some cases raters may give an individual higher-than-deserve ratings to motivate the individual or to maintain harmony within the group. In other cases raters may give an individual a lower –than-deserve rating because the organization would like to downsize and these are the individuals they would like to retrench. Of course sometimes evaluators may give lower than deserve rating to punish a particular individual or give higher rating to reward a particular individual.

Ans: When raters set about to evaluate an individuals’ performance, they usually attribute the performance to causes such as ability and motivation. Raters may also make attributions in order to understand what caused the specific level of performance and what to do about it. So, for example, if they believe that the poor performance was due to laziness on an individual’s part they may decide to punish the individual. However, if they decide that the poor performance was due to lack of organizations system support they can work towards fixing the system rather than penalize the individual.

Ans: As long as human beings are evaluating other human beings, some amount of subjectivity and bias is bound to creep into the evaluation. For example, in many cases interpersonal affect, or liking has been shown to impact the individual rating. When the rater likes a ratee more than other ratee he/she would award the individual a higher than deserve rating because of his/her affect towards the ratee. Similarly gender and other personality based stereotypes have been shown to impact ratings. This is why it is important that raters and ratees are trained in the use of performance evaluation systems.