The Perception of the Human Resources Managers on the Audit carried out to the Performance Appraisal System

Abstract

The market is becoming more competitive and demanding, forcing organizations to bet on innovation and differentiation. Thus, human capital appears as the only element that cannot be imitated, so it is important for organizations to retain the appropriate employees to achieve the objectives, that is, employees who have the necessary skills and who try to achieve the objectives set. The Performance Evaluation seeks to contribute to this goal by rewarding those employees who denote this alignment, motivating them to continue and seeking to correct those that are below that established (Haines et al., 2012). In order for the Performance Evaluation to achieve these objectives effectively, it is desirable to assert that its process is structured in a correct and adequate way, minimizing the effects of central tendency (Gomes et al., 2008), halo effect, comparison effect (Caetano, 2008), among others, for which it can contribute to the regular analysis of the same by qualified auditors. The objectives of the present study are to understand how Performance Appraisal is conceived and conducted by the organizations and to discern about the contribution of the audits to its improvement. It is also important to understand the strategies adopted by the auditors (audited and audited).
In order to analyze these issues a qualitative methodology was used, with thirteen semi-directives interviews to human resource managers and technicians, with prior experience of having been audited. From the analysis, it was observed that organizations are increasingly concerned with constructing clear and suitable performance appraisal processes, trying to minimize perceptual errors in evaluations and changing their procedures toward evaluation typologies with multi-evaluators. According to the auditees' experience, the audits fit into the "Element" approach (Kaziliūnas, 2008), that is, they mainly follow the requirements of the standard, and the auditees’ behavior during the audit process is in tune with a commitment and sometimes an avoidance approach (Funnel et al., 2012). It should be noted that human resource audits have mainly a legal and functional scope (Olalla et al., 2002), denoting a transition to the strategic scope (Olalla et al., 2002).