Teacher’s Job Appraisal and Compensation

I/O Psychology

Teacher’s job appraisal and compensation

Psychology refers to the science of mental processes and behavior.  Industrial and Organizational (I/O) psychology relates to the science of mental processes and behavior in the workplace. I/O psychologists conduct scientific research in all sorts of people-oriented workplaces like what personality traits predict better performance under stress and the social factors that leads to conflict in the workgroups. Industrial and Organizational Psychologists help practitioners in applying research findings to problems like matching employees to jobs and increasing cooperation in workplace teams. The link between professional practice and scientific research is high in I/O/ psychology because workplaces provide both natural laboratories for the study of psychological questions and the setting where research-based answers can get evaluated and applied. Industrial and Organizational (I/O) psychologists address two primary goals in their practice and research. First, they promote effective job performance by employees, which eventually leads to higher performance by the entire organization (Pryce 2012) The second goal is in contributing to the human welfare by improving safety, health, and well-being of the employees. In effective organizations, employees are capable of performing the jobs well and are also well adjusted and healthy in the workplace.

I/O psychology emerged early in the 1900s when psychologists began to apply learning laboratory principles, motivation, and memory in solving problems in the workplace. Over the years, applications and research in I/O psychology continue to get influenced by laboratory research subfields of psychology, including personality, cognitive psychology, emotion, health psychology, motivation and social psychology.

Performance appraisal

Performance Evaluation refers to the process of measuring a group’s or individual’s work outcomes and behaviors against the job’s expectations. Performance appraisal gets frequently used in compensation and promotion decisions assist in validating and designing personnel correction methods, and for performance management.  I/O psychologists use this information typically from the job analysis in determining a position’s performance dimension, and later construct a rating scale describing each level of the job’s performance.

Methods of performance appraisal

The information used in the teacher’s performance evaluation can be from subjective measures and objective measures.

Objective measures

The job performance objective measures include counting the frequency of particular conducts or the results from those behaviors. For instance, some of the real purpose measures include the records about the number of days that the teachers are absent from work, the number of complaints filed against them, or how often they get late at work. Objective appraisal measures are valuable as they provide a close link between actual and theoretical criteria. If the general approach for a better performance as a salesperson is selling an organization’s product, the closely related actual criterion is an objective count of the products’ number sold per month.

However, scientific methods in the performance of jobs are not correct for all situations, however, because some performance criteria can’t get evaluated by counting things. For instance, it wouldn’t make any sense to evaluate the job performance of a teacher by counting the students’ number taught per year. Teachers usually do not have control over the size of their class, and in any case, many enrollments tell us nothing on what the students learned. In other words, objective measures may fail in assessing all the aspects of performance for the simple jobs that are of interest to an organization (Rynes, 2012).

Subjective measures

I/O psychologists sometimes advocate that objective performance measures get supplemented, or even sometimes be replaced by individual measures. Job performance’s measures take supervisor’s form of judgment about the various aspects of the teacher’s work, including the overall performance level, performance consistency from day to day, and longer-term negative or positive performance trends. Typically, these judgments get recorded by the supervisor on a behavior-focused form or graphic rating form (Aamodt, 2012).

Visual evaluation forms list various criterion-related dimensions of the fulfillment of the job and provide space for the supervisor to rate each teacher’s performance on each dimension, by use of a scale ranging from about 1 to 10, or from outstanding to poor. The graphic ratings are available, but they do always reflect the supervisor’s subjective judgment, whereas, in unstructured interviews, other factors other than the performance of the teachers influence the results. For instance, most graphic ratings get affected by leniency error, which means that supervisors tend to use top of the scale only. As a result, all the teachers in the school receive ratings that are better or satisfactory. Furthermore, many supervisors show errors based on the halo effect, which means that they tend to give the similar rating on every job performance’s dimension. For instance, in one aspect, if teacher Jack receives an outstanding rating, the teacher will probably get rated near or at outstanding on all the others. Similarly, if teacher Jane gets rated as only satisfactory on one subject, she probably will get satisfactory ratings on the rest of the subjects.