We May Need Field Staff Self-Evaluations, but Can We Trust Them?

 

 

As CMOs, much of our time and toil revolves around the establishment of measurement tools and methodologies. We size up ad campaigns for their impact on sales; we look at commercial spots and the taglines that consumers respond to; and we run optimization software to determine how best to allocate our budgets.

Our pioneering spirit in measuring marketing means we sometimes overlook the metrics we've long had in place — staff self-evaluations. To gauge market orientation, customer satisfaction, and relationship quality, perception surveys lend a lot of value. But they also may introduce significant biases.

In a recent working paper from Marketing Science Institute — "The Difference Between Perceptual and Objective Performance Measures: An Empirical Analysis" — researchers Kusum Ailawadi, Rajiv Dant, and Dhruv Grewal study the relationship between a large North American retailer and its independent sales agents. Using five years of self-evaluations, they measure agents' perceptions of their own and the retailer's capabilities, their relationship with the retailer, the market environment, and personal performance. The three set these perceptions against objective information — the retailer's financial records.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found the average agent scored himself with a plethora of positives that weren't reflected in their sales records (although the underconfident agents showed less bias). Agents attributed their success to their own talents and efforts but pinned their failures on the retailer.

However, perceived performance can have bear a strong statistical relationship with observed performance when respondents aren't asked to grade themselves. To reduce bias and improve accuracy, the three recommend that you ask questions about the influences on performance in self-evaluations and measure actual staff member performance influences by several different methods.

The implications are that self-perceptions of staff, agents, or channel partners can be a good leading indicator of future performance if you take care to reduce the inherent bias in the response by carefully wording the questions. The implications for developing fast, inexpensive barometers are promising.

To find out how your organization can improve its subjective measures, visit www.msi.org and read the article, "The Difference Between Perceptual and Objective Performance Measures: An Empirical Analysis," by Kusum L. Ailawadi, associate professor of business administration at Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College; Rajiv P. Dant, associate professor of marketing at Clarkson University; and Dhruv Grewal, Toyota Professor of Marketing at Babson College.