Help individual employees recognize that plateauing is a normal occurrence. Honest feedback can send clear signals to employees that their activities are important and that you are prepared to provide support to assist them over this period.

Reduce the focus on promotion as a major indicator of success. Where reduced promotional opportunities lie at the cause of employee plateauing, organisations can emphasise alternative ways by which success can be measured:

Provide opportunities for greater participation in setting goals and determining methods and procedures. Plateaued employees usually have a wealth of experience for the organisation to draw upon.

Assign the staffer to train new employees and bring others up to speed.

Devise a major project for the worker, with full autonomy, to show your trust and to provide new zest.

Since plateaued employees are often bored, ensure they are given useful activities; avoid assigning duties and responsibilities that are clearly beneath them, just to keep them occupied.

Change the structure of the organisation. Make modifications to create a more horizontal structure and establish additional responsible positions.

Consider lateral promotions. If demoralised workers have little chance of promotion in your area, their skills and talents may be valuable in another area.

Seek the employee’s input. Explore with the individual how the current job can be made more stimulating, without overstepping current parameters.

Provide specialist, qualified counselling. Where necessary, this will help them overcome individual crises associated with career plateauing.

Understanding human behavior is critical for managerial effectiveness today. To attract and retain high-performing employees, managers must possess interpersonal skills in order to relate to employees and create a positive and supportive work environment where people want to work. People skills, in addition to technical skills, are imperative for managers to succeed in the modern demanding workplace.

Regards

1. In the past, most organizations assessed only how well employees performed the tasks listed on a job description, but today’s less hierarchical and more service-oriented organizations require more.

2. Researchers now recognize three major types of behavior that constitute performance at work:

a. Task performance

i. Performing the duties and responsibilities that contribute to the production of a good or service or to administrative tasks.

ii. This includes most of the tasks in a conventional job description.

b. Citizenship

i. Actions that contribute to the psychological environment of the organization, such as helping others when not required, supporting organizational objectives, treating co-workers with respect, making constructive suggestions, and saying positive things about the workplace.

c. Counter productivity

i. Actions that actively damage the organization. These behaviors include stealing, damaging company property, behaving aggressively toward co-workers, and taking avoidable absences.

3. Most managers believe good performance means doing well on the first two dimensions and avoiding the third.

a. A person who does core job tasks very well but is rude and aggressive toward co-workers is not going to be considered a good employee in most organizations, and even the most pleasant and upbeat worker who can’t do the main job tasks well is not going to be a good employee.

B. Purposes of Performance Evaluation

1. Management uses evaluations for general human resource decisions, such as promotions, transfers, and terminations.

2. Evaluations identify training and development needs.

3. They pinpoint employee skills and competencies needing development.

4. They provide feedback to employees on how the organization views their performance and are often the basis for reward allocations including merit pay increases.

5. We will emphasize performance evaluation in its role as a mechanism for providing feedback and as a determinant of reward allocations.

C. What Do We Evaluate?

1. Introduction

a. The criteria or criterion used to evaluate performance has a major influence on performance.

i. The three most popular sets of criteria are individual task outcomes, behaviors, and traits.

2. Individual task outcomesa. If ends count, rather than means, then management should evaluate an employee’s task outcomes.

3. Behaviors

a. It is difficult to attribute specific outcomes to the actions of employees in advisory or support positions or employees whose work assignments are part of a group effort.

b. We may readily evaluate the group’s performance, but if it is hard to identify the contribution of each group member, management will often evaluate the employee’s behavior.

c. Measured behaviors needn’t be limited to those directly related to individual productivity.

d. As we pointed out in discussing organizational citizenship behavior (see Chapters 1 and 3), helping others, making suggestions for improvements, and volunteering for extra duties make work groups and organizations more effective and often are incorporated into evaluations of employee performance.

4. Traits

a. The weakest set of criteria is individual traits because they are farthest removed from the actual performance of the job itself.

b. Traits may or may not be highly correlated with positive task outcomes, but only the naive would ignore the reality that such traits are frequently used in organizations for assessing performance.

D. Who Should Do the Evaluating?

1. By tradition the task has fallen to managers, because they are held responsible for their employees’ performance.

2. But others may do the job better.

a. With many of today’s organizations using self-managed teams, telecommuting, and other organizing devices that distance bosses from employees, the immediate superior may not be the most reliable judge of an employee’s performance.

b. Peers and even subordinates are being asked to take part in the process, and employees are participating in their own evaluation.

3. A recent survey found about half of executives and 53 percent of employees now have input into their performance evaluations.

a. As you might expect, self-evaluations often suffer from over inflated assessment and self-serving bias, and they seldom agree with superiors’ ratings.

b. They are probably better suited to developmental than evaluative purposes and should be combined with other sources of information to reduce rating errors.

4. In most situations, in fact, it is highly advisable to use multiple sources of ratings.

5. Any individual performance rating may say as much about the rater as about the person being evaluated.

a. By averaging across raters, we can obtain a more reliable, unbiased, and accurate performance evaluation.

6. The latest approach to performance evaluation is 360-degree evaluations.

Some allow employees to choose the peers and subordinates who evaluates them, which can artificially inflate feedback.

a. It’s also difficult to reconcile disagreements between rater groups.

b. There is clear evidence that peers tend to give much more lenient ratings that supervisors or subordinates, and peers also tend to make more errors in appraising performance.

E. Methods of Performance Evaluation

1. Written essays

a. The simplest method of evaluation is to write a narrative describing an employee’s strengths, weaknesses, past performance, potential, and suggestions for improvement.

b. No complex forms or extensive training is required, but the results often reflect the ability of the writer.

2. Critical incidents

a. Critical incidents focus on those behaviors that are key in making the difference between executing a job effectively and executing it ineffectively.

b. The appraiser writes down anecdotes that describe what the employee did that was especially effective or ineffective.

c. A list of critical incidents provides a rich set of examples to discuss with the employee.

3. Graphic ratings scales

a. Graphic ratings scales refer to a set of performance factors, such as quantity and quality of work, depth of knowledge, cooperation, loyalty, attendance, honesty, and initiative, is listed.

b. The evaluator then goes down the list and rates each on incremental scales. The scales typically specify five points.c. Popular because they are less time-consuming to develop and administer and allow for quantitative analysis and comparison.

4. Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS)

a. BARS combine major elements from the critical incident and graphic rating scale approaches.

b. The appraiser rates the employees based on items along a continuum, but the points are examples of actual behavior.

c. To develop the BARS, participants first contribute specific illustrations of effective and ineffective behavior, which are translated into a set of performance dimensions with varying levels of quality.

5. Forced comparisons

a. Forced comparisons evaluate one individual’s performance against the performance of one or more. It is a relative rather than an absolute measuring device.

b. The two most popular are group order ranking and individual ranking.

i. The group order ranking requires the evaluator to place employees into a particular classification, such as top one-fifth or second one-fifth.

ii. The individual ranking approach rank-orders employees from best to worst.

Dear Haitham,

Thanks for fruitful insights about the subject matter.

Regards

Rafique

Help individual employees recognize that plateauing is a normal occurrence. Honest feedback can send clear signals to employees that their activities are important and that you are prepared to provide support to assist them over this period.

Reduce the focus on promotion as a major indicator of success. Where reduced promotional opportunities lie at the cause of employee plateauing, organisations can emphasise alternative ways by which success can be measured:

Provide opportunities for greater participation in setting goals and determining methods and procedures. Plateaued employees usually have a wealth of experience for the organisation to draw upon.

Assign the staffer to train new employees and bring others up to speed.

Devise a major project for the worker, with full autonomy, to show your trust and to provide new zest.

Since plateaued employees are often bored, ensure they are given useful activities; avoid assigning duties and responsibilities that are clearly beneath them, just to keep them occupied.

Change the structure of the organisation. Make modifications to create a more horizontal structure and establish additional responsible positions.

Consider lateral promotions. If demoralised workers have little chance of promotion in your area, their skills and talents may be valuable in another area.

Seek the employee’s input. Explore with the individual how the current job can be made more stimulating, without overstepping current parameters.

Provide specialist, qualified counselling. Where necessary, this will help them overcome individual crises associated with career plateauing.

Thank you, Saboor for input!

In fact the plateaued employees are normally experienced and  are in a position to add values to work but due to this factor ( no chances of promotion)  they take passive postures and drag themselves with normal routine.

inputs are required to make them active so that they  start contributing in a productive way.

Looking for more inputs from RG.

Best Regards

Rafique 

Congrats for choosing a relevant issue. I hope my paper on career plateau and burnout may help you; it's in my page on the Research Gate. 

 Thank you, Arhan.

i could  not figure out specific article of yours in your publications. Could you please help?

Regards

Rafique

In agreement with Abdul Saboor, as the hallmarks of the organization plateaued employees should be in position to train and develop newer employees as well as involved in the planning of operations in the organizational structure. Rapid change in technology brings change to organizational structure in today's competitive economy which means there is a constant need for learning. There is no room for complacency. Leaders need to always keep up with trending patterns. As the plateaued employee trains and develops new employees, he/she will also learn from them. Leaders can make better assessments of the newer employees when they learn how one learns, and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. This is guidance on both ends which leads to better decision making. Aside from monetary rewards, leaders will be rewarded in their new found knowledge as well as seeing the development of the newcomers. 

In accordance with Stephanie's answer, I believe that the non-monetary methods of motivation can be put to use to enhance the performance of plateaued employees. They can be involved in decision -making process and in strategy formulation. Their last level of needs as per Maslow can be exploited to provide next level of satisfaction to them. 

Dear M. Rafique, Happy Eid. I've reloaded my paper on career plateaus and career burnouts on the Research Gate (into my archive). Happy reading! All the best! 

Thank you , Ramandeep and Arhan!

it is a valued information for me.

A career plateau is the point in a career when the chances of (further) hierarchical promotion are very low. This interesting question, on how the performance of plateaued employees might be improved, implicitly (if not explicitly) assumes that poor performance explains a career plateau. There are objective and subjective dimensions to the phenomenon: objective plateaus point to structural and observable aspects that are associated with the time spent in a current position; subjective plateaus connote the feeling that one has been at one’s level too long and that one might have reached the end of one’s progression. (To note, some employees may not think they have reached an objective plateau even though they have been working at the same level for whatever duration, typically, five years, fits the scheme of things; conversely, some think they have reached a subjective plateau even though they have been in tenure for less than that.) Some attention should also be given to structural plateaus: they are caused by hierarchical structures that demographics exacerbate, and are entirely beyond the control of individuals. Add to this the practice, in many international organizations, of recruiting and promoting by nationality and, more recently, of encouraging gender considerations. So, this question may need recalibrating.

Thank you Olivier,

This is a good dimension of  viewing the  concept "Plateaued employees". can I have some paper or references about these concrete aspects as literature does not sound healthy about this aspects.

My view point is employees who are in possession of  in depth knowledge of processes but have limited knowledge as per  latest technology.

so I re frame  it as : "valued plateaued employees".

Kind Regards

Dear Muhammad, Sadly, I have no references to offer. What I argued seems to me commmon sense. Tangentially, you might tbe interested in (i) On Knowledge Behaviors, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/knowledge-behaviors; (ii) On Internal Knowledge Markets, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/internal-knowledge-markets; (iii) A Primer on Intellectual Capital, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/primer-intellectual-capital; (iv) Leading Top Talent in the Workplace, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/leading-top-talent-workplace; (v) Engaging Staff in the Workplace, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/engaging-staff-workplace; (vi) Harvesting Knowledge, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/harvesting-knowledge; (vii) Showcasing Knowledge, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/showcasing-knowledge; (viii) A Primer on Talent Management, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/primer-talent-management; (ix) Drawing Learning Charters, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/drawing-learning-charters; (x) Coaching and Mentoring, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/coaching-and-mentoring; (xi) Staff Profile Pages, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/staff-profile-pages; (xii) Identifying and Sharing Good Practices, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/identifying-and-sharing-good-practices; (xiii) Conducting Exit Interviews, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/conducting-exit-interviews; and (xiv) Managing Knowledge Workers, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/managing-knowledge-workers.

Thank you, Olivier.

 It will be OK for me  to further explore this concept.

Regards