A GTE survey in the mid-1990s, for example, revealed that the performance of its different billing operations, as measured by the accuracy of bills sent out, was closely tied to the leadership style of the unit managers.

Units whose managers exercised a relatively high degree of control made more mistakes than units with more autonomous workforces.

By encouraging changes in leadership style through training sessions, discussion groups, and videos, GTE was able to improve overall billing accuracy by 22 in the year following the survey and another 24 the year after.

He is the author of Getting the Truth into Workplace Surveys (HBR, February 2002).

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Most people, due a number of factors including the opportunities open to them from the organisational design and processes, and their own level of motivation and skills, do a perfectly good, at times great, job.but are not key talent.

Research conducted in 2012 by OBoyle and Aguinis with 633,263 people in a total of 198 samples found that performance in 94 of these groups did not follow a normal distribution.

Rather they fell into what is called a Power Law distribution.

Most performance was generated by a small group of superstars.

The typicalaverage performer would fall below the mean or average result.

Again, in this model, the typical performer is below average (speaking from a statistical perspective).

The results lend themselves to the 80 20 rule, which says that 80 of the work is done by 20 of the people.

It does NOT imply that most people are lower performers, only the fact that the variability of performance is high and that the curve should not be equal above and below the mean.

There are an equal number of people above and below the average.

But fairness does not mean equality or equivalent rewards for all.

High performing companies have very wide variations in compensation, reflecting the fact that some people really do drive far more value than others.

Those with critical skills that can make or break the company.

She has managed both local in-country national and expatriate programs and has been an expat twice during her career.

Jacque has the following certifications: CCP, GPHR, HCS and SWP as well as a B.S.

M.S in Psychology and an MBA.

She belongs to SHRM, Human Capital Institute and World at Work.

Jacque been a speaker in the U.S., Asia and Europe, and is a regular contributor to various HR and talent management publications.

A workforce of carefully selected employees does NOT fit those criteria.

High-end outliers are treasured and coddled while low-enders are lopped off rather than retained.

Ive always described the distribution pattern as like a baseball cap with a long bill for the right-side tail.

You say it should be elementary Comp 201 for our profession: Well most companies out there use the bell curve.

Most of our work deals with those two opposite outlier group.

It tends to be top management (generally sales or accounting types) who impose destructive policies based on unrealistic bell curve assumptions.

But, I think we need to be careful when, in the name of science, a new paradigm is defined that is supposed to represent the right way.

But, in other very successful countries (like those in Scandinavia) the distribution is far flatter, yet total results fairly comparable.

This is why strategy and culture are such big components of compensation, and many other types of, success.

Bell Curve Performance Appraisal Pdf