And one of the methods for this is a management by objective, and so
that's a method for benchmarking employees' ratings to their achievement of
prespecified goals.
And when we're talking about management by objectives, an example could be, again,
a 5-point rating scale.
So here, to get a rating of 4, the objective would be
to meet 100% of the new business target.
And to get the highest ratings,
you'd actually have to beat your target objective.
And at lower levels of meeting that new business target,
you would get a lower level.
And so how is this different from a behaviorally-anchored rating scale?
Well, you'll notice that, again, you're not measuring their behaviors,
not measuring what it is they try to do or
their effort or whatever they're trying to do to get new business.
You're only measuring whether an employee actually
achieves this outcome or this objective.
And so typically we're talking about measuring based on outputs,
or using a technique such as management by objectives,
if we know what employees should accomplish to be successful,
not what behaviors they should use in order to be successful.
We're also typically going to benchmark on outputs and
use techniques such as MBOs when we can measure what employees accomplished.
That is, for example, if we're talking about an airline flight attendant,
then it might be very easy to see that an employee's behaving courteously,
but we might not be actually measuring outputs such as customer satisfaction.
And in that case,
we'd want to use something like BARS as opposed to management by objective.
But if we're talking about a job such as salespeople who
would have a lot of autonomy, whose outcomes would be very
easy to measure even if we aren't necessarily directly supervising them.
Well, in this case, since we can measure those outputs,
we might be more likely to use a technique such as management by objective.