An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Performance Appraisal System In The Ministry Of Education In Liberia

Performance appraisal is a widely discussed concept in the field of performance management.The importance accorded to performance appraisal systems in part arises from the nature of the current organizational environment,which is marked by the need to achieve organizational goals as well as remain relevant in intensely competitive environment through superior employee performance.For this reason,unlike the ministry of education in Liberia,most organizations established attractive performance appraisal systems to help motivate their employees to strive hard towards the desired performance that will be reflected on their productivity.However,regardless of the efforts and resources devoted to the implementation of various performance appraisal systems in Liberia,employee productivity has been deteriorating to the large extent.As much as this is happening,there seem to be a vacuum in the actual contribution of performance appraisal enhancing tool on employee performance and this may due to the fact that,the existing performance appraisal might be unreasonable and has not been studied before at the Ministry of Education.This study therefore intended to assess influence of performance appraisal management practices on employees in the Ministry of Education in Liberia.In doing so,theories and literatures were reviewed to identify a suitable model for the case study ministry.250 questionnaires were used to collect first hand data from both ordinary workers and officials at various departments in the Ministry of Education.The collected data were verified for validity and reliability and subsequently correlation analysis and multiple linear regressions were used to test the research hypothesis using inferential statistics.The results show that the strengths of relationships among performance appraisal system,employee motivation and the overall organizational performance were found to be stronger for official workers than for ordinal workers.The finding in these differences portrays an important policy implication in performance appraisal assessment research.This can be partly explained by the level or rank of the workers at the ministry of education.Since top level employees are normally charged with the responsibility to conduct performance appraisal to evaluate their subordinates(ordinary workers),if they are mandated to evaluate the effectiveness of the appraisal system,they might be biased in their evaluation.In lieu of this,we propose that ordinary employees can be preferred in assessing the performance appraisal system.