ASSESMENT OF EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION PRACTICE AT ETHIOPIAN ELECTRIC POWER CORPORATION; EASTERN ADDIS ABABA REGION

Abstract

This project is designed to assess the perception of employees towards the practices and problems of performance evaluation in Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation Eastern Addis Ababa Region. To this end; the study has the objective to assess the perception of employees towards the problems and practices of performance evaluation. On the basis of data collected through questionnaires and interview, which are founded on the theoretical assessment of related literatures; I have tried to unearth some of the real problems of appraisals based on the opinion of the ratees in that particular organization. The questionnaire was distributed to 100 employees of the corporation working in the region and 20 districts: in which only 94 were fully completed and returned. The questionnaire was distributed to the employees on the basis of convenience sampling based on the willingness and cooperation of the respondents. The data collected were analyzed using statistics. On the basis of the data obtained from the respondents, the study identified the lack of transparency both during the evaluation and after evaluation as its major findings. Almost all the participants vented out that they are not allowed to discuss the result of their ratings. As a result, they do not have a confidence on the appropriateness of the evaluation to make crucial human resource decisions. The lack of clarity of performance evaluation criteria and the subjectivity involved in the evaluation which resulted in role ambiguity and frustration among the employees were identified to be the other problem of performance appraisal in Ethiopian Electric power corporation (EEPCO). On the other hand, the subjective nature of the standards against which the performance of employees is judged lead raters to manipulate the evaluation for their own personal agendas. The universal purpose of performance evaluations across the board were also common problems in the system. The performance evaluation forms do not reflect the performance of the employees as they can be irrelevant for some jobs. Moreover, through my research I have discovered that raters usually do not continually record or document the performance of employees over the evaluation period. In this regard, it was identified that raters evaluate the performance of employees on the basis of recent behavior. Based on the findings of the study, I have forwarded some recommendations so that if they are used by the bank will give them an insight as to the practice and its associated problems of performance appraisal in the organization.