Appraisal Of Ethical Performance: A Theoretical Model

Abstract

Ethical behavior of organizational members has been the subject of considerable interest during the past decade both among practitioners and academics. However, performance appraisal systems, for the most part, have exclusively concentrated on business performance to the exclusion of ethical dimensions of job performance. Given the increasing importance of ethical issues in organizations, there is a need to correct this aberration in the current approach to appraisal system development and include ethical dimensions in the performance appraisal domain. As a first step to the inclusion of ethical dimensions to the job performance, we propose a cognitive model for appraisal ethical performance in organizations. The performance appraisal literature based on the cognitive processing paradigm (e.g., Landy and Farr, 1980) provides a rich theoretical foundation for studying ethical judgment process. Specifically, the cognitive approach describes how the performance judgment process is influenced by schematic, attributional and affective influences when processing ratee performance information.