egrees of success were identified, from distinguished to ineffective. Supervisors now are able to match an employee's actual performance to the guidelines provided by the assessment program in order to rate an employee (Grote, 2000).
Behind each of these changes to performance appraisal systems was a desire by the organization to make the performance assessment more relevant to the overall operation of the agency. These groups determined that it was no longer efficient to have a performance system which measured only individual performance, but instead, it was necessary to find a way to tie individual performance to the agency's mission. Although time-consuming, the author is confident that these approaches will prove valuable aids to organizations (both public and private) in meeting these goals.
Each year, Industry Week, conducts a census of manufacturing plants in the United States to gather data about how the plants are being run, and the publication also selects facilities which exemplify successful manufacturing processes in its Best Plants program. In 1999, the author of "The Untrained, Unemployed Masses" was surprised to learn that there was a significant gap between the number of plants that supported the idea of empowering employees, and the number of plants which actually had empowerment programs in place (Hernan, 1999).
According to the publication's survey, 83.4 percent of "plant-level managers said self-directed work teams are either 'somewhat effective' or 'extremely effective'" (Hernan, 1999, p. 94). However, the same study also revealed that more than one-third (35 percent) of executives indicated that empowered work teams have not been implemented at their facilities. In facilities where empowerment programs have been implemented, executives indicated that more than two-thirds of the plants have less than one-quarter of their workforce actively participating in self-directed groups (Hernan, 1999).
Acc...