Implicit Bias and Performance Evaluation
Suppose you are an office-goer who decides to take public transportation or your own car based on the traffic you witness. One day you decide to take a bus to office based on the traffic you expect on the streets. It so happens that when you meet your colleague at the office; you are in a situation explaining your choice of taking the bus that day. In your discussion, you are rationalizing your choice.
This act, very likely unbeknownst to you, is going to guide most of your discussions during your day with your colleagues. On that day, you might internally feel the urge to bring out reasons of your decisions taken on on-going projects; even though you are not expected to.
The above scenario might seem short-term in its effects – but it is not so. Eventually these disparate and large numbers of implicit influences affect your performance and may have a telling effect. These implicit influences have a way of “piling-up” over a period of time and guiding your action.
What does “implicit influences” mean?
Popularly coined as “Cognitive biases”, implicit influences include the whole thinking process that an individual goes through when trying to understand various aspects of daily living. As the thinking process progresses certain aspects are predominant and affect all of our thinking.
Currently, most of us ignore such influences and go on with our routine work. Supervisors and/or Managers at various levels of hierarchies might actually find it helpful to pay attention to the implicit influences that their team members “experience” daily. Such experiences are bound to affect the long-term performance of an individual.
In an organizational or a group setting, it is very common to highlight an individual’s performance based on certain objective outcomes and/or achievements. There are countless metrics that have been developed so that individuals’ contribution towards a business/corporate target is evaluated and “rated” on a certain scale.
In the guise of performance evaluation of such explicit sets of behaviour, ignored are the layers of underlying non-apparent influences that are implicit in nature.
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