Documents Conyon, Martin J. 3 results

" Performance appraisals, the evaluation of an employee's job performance over the previous period by one's supervisor, are a standard practice in virtually every organization. They are one of the most important, time-consuming, and unpopular tasks in management. Despite this, remarkably little is known about how performance appraisals operate, especially their consequences. Indeed, much of what is written from a practitioner perspective typically suggests that they do little. By contrast, we document empirical evidence of the importance of performance appraisals using data from a large US corporation. The results in this case show that appraisals are informative and directly influence many dimensions of employee outcomes, including employee bonuses, merit pay, employee promotions, and decisions to exit the firm. The evidence shows that the appraisal process here is consistent with a relational, open-ended view of employment. It is not consistent with the common economic view that performance appraisals simply settle-up contractually based employment relationships."

"The authors assert that broad-based stock options create a social exchange relationship between the employer and employees, leading to higher individual job performance in the next period. They compare this social exchange hypothesis to the more typical incentive-based explanation for stock options, which is that holding options generates financial incentives for better individual job performance in the current period. Findings show that significant and meaningful relationships are associated with social exchange effects and that these are both independent of incentive effects and arguably greater than those for the incentive effects. The authors use non-parametric and parametric fixed effects models, other controls for sample heterogeneity, and alternative specifications to address possible concerns about identification and endogeneity. These results extend empirical studies of social exchange relationships to common workplace practices. They also raise the possibility that some of the performance effects attributed to incentives in other studies may actually be attributable to social exchange effects."