SOCIAL COGNITION AND PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL IN ORGANIZATIONS (SCHEMA, JUDGEMENT, INFORMATION

This study explored an approach by which to apply social cognition findings in an organizational setting, and provided data as to how performance-related information may be selectively attended to and remembered, based upon its relationship to other information presented about a person.;A "performance schema" was advanced as a consensually derived idea about performance in a specific setting. Managers from three different departments in a large industrial organization were studied. The study was accomplished in three phases. A comprehensive array of 67 categories of performance considered in judging managerial performance were identified by qualitative methods in phase one. Ratings from 102 managers in three departments were then obtained regarding how influential each of these categories was to their judgments of performance. The engineering and manufacturing departments were selected as the targets for which to develop performance schemata based upon the means of discriminator categories derived from discriminant function analyses. Performance schemata were defined by the categories judged to be more influential/discriminating for manufacturing and engineering.;These performance schemata were manipulated in phase three. Schema-relevant categories from both the manufacturing and engineering performance schemata were used to construct cases. The conditions of job set, schema-relevance, and effectiveness of performance were then varied. It was found that the poorest accuracy was obtained in the schema-relevant, ineffective performance condition and the best in the schema-irrelevant, ineffective condition. The greater information value and greater attention paid to the cases in those conditions were hypothesized to have aided memory.;Several difficulties in assessing performance schemata were: (a) the current methodology may be inadequate for assessing schemata in non-laboratory person-processing situations; (b) the relatedness of the categories to the two performance schemata (i.e., manufacturing and engineering) may be more complex than merely calling one "relevant" and the other "irrelevant", which would affect the functional consequences expected; and (c) sharp differences may not exist at the departmental level in terms of performance schemata.