When Multi-Raters Compete

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Multi-rater performance evaluation is a contemporary management control practice that promises more informative performance evaluations. However, we have yet to understand whether such systems can also pose problems related to different groups of employees. For this purpose, I collaborate with a European e-commerce company to examine strategic behavior in multi-rater systems, focusing on situations in which employees function as multi-raters and compete for monetary rewards. I focus on understanding gender differences in both mutual rating relationships and strategic rating behaviors, that is, strategic downvoting to improve individual standing and reciprocal ratings for mutual benefit. Results from multivariate regressions indicate that female employees, compared to male employees, are 33.6% less likely to engage in mutual rating relationships when they compete with the respective multi-rater for rewards. At the same time, in mutual rating relationships, female employees are more likely to provide lower-than-average ratings, consistent with strategic downvoting behavior. In comparison, their male counterparts provide higher-than-average ratings, consistent with reciprocal rating behavior. These findings highlight important challenges related to multi-rater performance evaluation and help explain gender differences in career advancement.

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Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this project, we explore the performance evaluation consequences employees experience when they telecommute. We posit that professional network formation is an important mediator in the relation between telecommuting and performance evaluation, as employees who telecommute build less effective networks, which are, in turn, associated with less favorable evaluation and promotion decisions. Exploiting proprietary data from an e-commerce firm and the first COVID-19 pandemic-led lockdown as an exogenous shock to telecommuting, we derive three important insights. First, we find support for the notion that employees who telecommute build less effective networks and specifically achieve lower centrality in their firm’s social network. Second, we find that when employees have lower network centrality, this is associated with more average (as opposed to extremely positive or extremely negative) performance ratings and a lower likelihood of being rated as “promotion-ready”. Third, we find that employees’ level of network centrality mediates the relation between telecommuting and performance evaluation outcomes. Collectively, our results highlight the challenges that telecommuting as a relatively novel type of work arrangement poses for management control.

Performance Evaluation | Daniel Schaupp

When Multi-Raters Compete

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