Halo Effect Errors

Examples of Halo Effect Errors in the following topics:

• Evaluating Performance: Who, What, and How

  • Benefits of the PA system include increased employee effectiveness, higher likelihood of improved employee performance, the prompting of feedback, enhanced communication between employers and employees, fostering of trust, promotion of goal setting, and assessment of educational and other training needs.
  • Detriments of the PA system include the possible hindrance of quality control, stress for both employees and management, errors in judgment, legal issues arising from improper evaluations, and the implementation of inappropriate performance goals.
  • The most common problems in this area are leniency errors, halo effect errors, and central tendency errors.
  • Employee comparison methods attempt to evade the leniency and central tendency errors.

• Evaluating Employee Performance

  • Benefits of the PA system include increased employee effectiveness, higher likelihood of improved employee performance, the prompting of feedback, enhanced communication between employers and employees, fostering of trust, promotion of goal setting, and assessment of educational and other training needs.
  • Detriments of the PA system include the possible hindrance of quality control, stress for both employees and management, errors in judgment, legal issues arising from improper evaluations, and the implementation of inappropriate performance goals.
  • This method eliminates central-tendency and leniency errors but still allows for halo-effect errors to occur.

• Structuring Employee Feedback

  • Employee Comparison Models: Two of the main culprits of subjectivity are leniency error and central-tendency error (judging to favorably and judging everyone the same respectively).
  • This does incur halo effect errors, however.

• Cognitive Biases as a Barrier to Decision Making

  • The most common cognitive biases are confirmation, anchoring, halo effect, and overconfidence.
  • Halo effect: This is an observer's overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product, and it influences the observer's feelings and thoughts about that entity's overall character or properties.

• Personal Biases

  • Halo effect: This is the distortion of a person's overt positive or negative characteristics that are amplified and applied to other situations or scenarios.
  • Recognize the most common biases that may act as a barrier to effective decision making, particularly from the perspective of how best to avoid pitfalls

• Barriers to Managing Control

  • Managing control is essential to making sure that a process or system is running effectively within an organization.
  • There are sometimes barriers to testing, measuring, communicating, or observing how effectively a system or process is running.
  • These can be introduced by human error or software error.
  • A lack of resources, inaccurate measurements, information flow errors, and incorrect analyses can all result in significant barriers to managing control of a process or system.
  • Output changes over time, creating room for error in the measurement process.

• Learning to Speak

  • Sending effective communication requires skill and an understanding of the audience.
  • The ability to communicate effectively in speech and in writing is one of the most valuable professional skills.
  • Communicating effectively relies on credibility.
  • Mistakes in grammar and spelling, incompleteness, and errors in logic can have a negative impact on the audience's perception of the sender's credibility.
  • Using e-mail effectively poses particular challenges.

• Quality Control and Assurance

  • Quality assurance (QA) refers to the planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system to fulfill the quality requirements for a product or service It is a systematic measurement compared to a set standard, with process monitoring used to prevent errors.
  • Quality control and quality assurance work together to make sure that companies produce products that have the lowest possible error rate, so there will be fewer customer complaints and no need to rework the product in the future.
  • Discuss quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) as integral components of an effective organizational management structure

• Taking Corrective Action

  • This problem-solving process is the central consideration for effective corrective action.
  • Attempts at corrective action are often unsuccessful because of failures in the problem-solving process, like not having enough information to isolate the real problem, or a decision maker who has a stake in the process and may not want to admit that their department made an error.
  • Next, schedule an analysis of the effectiveness of the solution.
  • It is useful to have some contingency plans in place, as employees, customers, or vendors may have unique perspectives on the problem that management lacks that can lead to a more effective solution.
  • Model the problem-solving process of identifying contributing factors, taking corrective action, and assessing the effectiveness of a solution

• Reducing Workplace Stress

  • A combination of organizational change and stress management is often the most effective approach.
  • Among the many different techniques managers can use to effectively prevent employee stress, the main underlying themes are awareness of possibly stressful elements of the workplace and intervention when necessary to mitigate any stress that does arise.
  • Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company conducted several studies on the effects of stress prevention programs in a hospital setting.
  • In one study, the frequency of medication errors declined by 50% after prevention activities were implemented in a 700-bed hospital.