Negotiating meaning in appraisal interviews: Using GSS to secure partnership through dialogue

This paper reports on exploratory research, as part of a three-stage study, into the use of a Group Support System (GSS) – the Zing Team Room (ZTR) – to enhance interpersonal communication between supervisor/managers (raters) and employee/functionaries (ratees) during performance appraisal interviews. A view of performance review is proposed which portrays how the substance of communication acts elicits tacit knowledge. Here participants, as a partnership, employ techniques to dialogue individual or organisational performance issues. The ZTR is seen as a vehicle which supports joint efforts to co-create meaning. Each anticipates and responds to the questions raised or reflects and deliberates on the answers given by the other. In this way the intent on achieving negotiated commitment to action is captured and made explicit. The ideal of two-sided agreement, and mutual accord being achieved in appraisal interviews is revisited, in this paper, but not from the standpoint of conventional performance review methods. Received wisdom holds that management’s interest in the now familiar structured or semi-structured appraisal interview, while historically a function of ‘control’ over employee performance, may in fact have diminishing value. Notwithstanding much of the disillusionment with respect to performance review procedures reported in the research literature, there is an increasing indication that the rules of engagement between managers and employees are changing inexorably. For some time theorists have suggested alternative systems of thinking concerning organisational performance issues based on perspectives of social equity and propriety. It is argued, for instance, that systems of enablement or empowerment (negotiated or otherwise) are more in keeping with complex adaptive systems theory and chaos theory. Chaos theory contends that ‘control’ as a central principle of performance management is illusory since uncertainty, change, and discontinuity are constant. Through the lens of social constructivism, a workable approach to describing the appraisal partnering process is explored as an alternative to conventional performance review procedures.