Why self-appraisals may not be best way to judge job performance - Harvard Gazette

Editorial verdict

Credible academic findings with important caveats — the anchoring effect on manager ratings is well-evidenced, but the authors themselves acknowledge they cannot prove bias from the data alone; the race and gender disparities are real patterns that warrant scrutiny, not definitive proof of discriminatory intent.

Executive summary

This article reports on research co-authored by Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School, examining how gender and race influence performance ratings at a multinational financial services company. The central argument is that sharing employee self-appraisals with managers prior to managerial review creates an 'anchoring' effect, where manager scores closely mirror self-ratings. The research finds that women and workers of color consistently rate themselves lower, with women of color assigning themselves the lowest self-ratings of any group. Managers, in turn, rated people of color more harshly than white employees, while showing a partial 'gender boost' that reduced — but did not eliminate — disadvantages for women. A system glitch that prevented managers from viewing self-appraisals in one year showed reduced correlation between self- and manager ratings, though racial and gender dynamics persisted, partly because managers appeared to reference prior-year self-evaluations. The authors conclude that demographic patterns in ratings are sufficiently correlated with social identity to raise concerns, even absent definitive proof of bias, and the company subsequently ceased sharing self-evaluations with managers prior to review.