360 Degree Appraisal

The fast-paced business of today’s world has become increasingly global, competitive, and led by latest technological advances. The face of change, like never before, is driven by elements such as physical, cultural and technological, are working together. The appropriate management of human resources plays major roles in organisations to acclimate to the fast changing environment and to use the changes to their advantages (Ross, 1981). To withstand the challenges faced by the changes happening in business world, the Human Resource management too undergone a paradigm changes and evolved from Personal management.

Traditionally, the concept of Personnel Management used to treat workers as tools or machines, whereas Human Resource Management

Performance appraisal is one of the very critical elements in the overall performance management system. It is also one of the most contentious activities of HRM. There are several tools available to implement a performance appraisal. 360-degree appraisal is one of the vastly adopted by several HR practitioners. As described by Carson (2006), 360-degree appraisal is a methodology that collects feedback from an employee’s supervisors, subordinates, colleagues and customers in additional to his/her self-evaluation and those ratings are added to the overall feedback mix. According to Hendry et al., (2006), the collection of input from all-around the employee immediate environment ensures that the performance is based on the motivation of the employee and goal-driven and fair. But, Carson (2006), express his concern that the 360 degree appraisal method may backfire if we use it without

Those five cross-cultural dimensions are power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs collectivism, masculinity vs femininity and short term vs long term orientation. Power Distance refers to the extent to which members of a cultural group expect and accept inequality of power in the society i.e., how subordinates deal with their superiors decisions and vice versa. Low power distance indicates that the individuals in that culture feels that superiors are more reachable and see less differences in reporting relationships (Hofstede 1984). Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which individuals in a cultural group are comfortable with ambiguity. Individuals who are high on uncertainty avoidance, values more on stability and try to avoid uncertainty as much as possible (Hofstede 1984). Individualism vs Collectivism refers to (relationship) the extent to which individuals in society are autonomous or embedded in the group. i.e., some cultures place more importance on personal relationships rather than the task to be performed or the deal to be completed/vice versa where contractual obligations uphold. Masculinity vs femininity describes the extent that individuals exhibit masculine behaviours such as dominance, independence or feminine behaviours such as interdependence, empathy