The Impact of Culture on Performance Appraisals

Given today's rapidly changing business environment, internationally operating enterprises need to develop global strategies to effectively manage an increasingly multicultural workforce. Performance appraisals have become a valuable tool to simply document employee performance but also to further enhance an organization’s workforce job effectiveness. But how should performance management tools be designed and implemented to pursue their intended purposes when employees' different cultural values and beliefs impact the strategies of managing human resources? Should multinational enterprises adapt their performance management systems to local circumstances when they expand operations to other countries or should they rely on domestically designed practices which proved to be successful in particular cultural settings? In other words, the constantly growing number of global employee placements and growing multiculturalism at the workplace make effective performance appraisal and management systems an increasingly complex task.