Forced Ranking in Performance Management: Is It Fair or Flawed?

Understanding Forced Ranking

Forced Ranking is a performance management system where employees are ranked against each other. This method categorizes employees into different performance levels, often using a bell curve. For example, in a team of 10, the top 20% might be rated as high performers, the middle 70% as average, and the bottom 10% as low performers. This system aims to identify top talent and address underperformance.

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Satish

It is one of the ways of performance appraisal in which all the employees are put into a category group of either excellent, good/average, or poor performers. Usually, most of the employees fall under the average category. The organization fixes a level or standard for each category. For example, average performers are those who fall in the range of 50-70% performance. The major drawback of this method of performance appraisal is that it gives the same level of appraisal to employees on both extremes. For instance, an employee at 50% and another at 69% would receive the same appraisal. This is just an example. However, this method is straightforward as employees are simply placed into categories. The method of performance appraisal varies with the type of organization and the policies it follows.

Hope this helps give you an idea about it. For further understanding, you can refer to "Organizational Behavior" 13th edition by Stephen Robbins.

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