The appraisal of individual employees is almost inevitably dysfunctional. Organizational performance is improved through refinements to the overall system or process of production, which must be the focus of attention. According to this line of thought, individual performance appraisals typically divert attention from more important tasks; they focus people's attention on alleviating symptoms of poor performance rather than identifying root causes, and they serve only to demoralize workers who find the evaluations unfair or inequitable. Deming argues that performance can usefully be appraised at the system level only, because it is system improvements that must be stressed.
One can legitimately ask why summary evaluations are necessary. If the point of performance appraisal is to help the individual to comprehend what the organization desires or to aid in self-improvement, then a vague, multi-criterion evaluation -"You did well in sales level, but you need to pay more attention to established customers, at least as measured by repeat sales"-is often adequate and even superior to a single precise summary statistic, such as "Overall, you are a 3 on a scale of 1 to 6." leia todo o artigo
