When Performance Evaluation Becomes a Shared Responsibility: Implications for Supervisor Satisfaction and Retention

Performance evaluation practices have primarily been studied from the perspectives of firms and the employees being evaluated. We shift attention to supervisors and examine how two contemporary evaluation practices—multi-rater systems and calibration committees—reshape their role in evaluating employees. While supervisors traditionally bear primary responsibility for employee evaluations, these practices redistribute evaluative responsibility across multiple organizational actors, changing supervisors’ effort-related and psychological burden as well as their influence over evaluation outcomes. Using data from four survey waves, we find that both practices are positively associated with supervisors’ satisfaction with the performance evaluation process, but that these benefits vary with supervisors’ susceptibility to psychological burden and their residual claim in evaluation outcomes. Greater satisfaction with the evaluation process is, in turn, associated with lower turnover intentions. Overall, our findings show that contemporary performance evaluation practices not only affect how employees are evaluated but also reshape supervisors’ experience of a core managerial responsibility, with important implications for firms’ ability to retain managerial talent. Coauthored with Isabella Grabner and my former supervisors Utz Schäffer and Daniel Schaupp.