Dr. Manish Gupte has an exciting story to tell us about peer appraisals at companies. Being a software engineer himself in the early part of his career, he had noticed unfair practices in evaluating top performers during appraisal cycles, using the bell curve (grading employees as A, B, C & D).
Dr. Manish Gupte decided to do something about it. At the age of 26, while working as a Team Leader at a prominent IT firm, he developed a mathematical model based on Game Theory to encourage peer cooperation in Organizations. Game Theory uses mathematical modeling to obtain better results and decisions through interpersonal interactions.
Dr. Manish Gupte – Making Appraisals Fair & Effective
He pursued MS in economics, followed by Ph.D. with a dissertation on peer appraisals at Purdue University, USA. Dr. Manish Gupte has worked as a senior data scientist with renowned companies like Oracle and taught Managerial Economics to MBA graduates. He is also the Founder of Mechanism Analytics, working in econometrics, human resource analytics, retail analytics, image processing, speech recognition, big data, text analytics, and health.
Here is what Dr. Manish Gupte has to say:
My co-authors and I analyzed annual appraisals data, 360 degrees. We found that employees were forming groups on language and inflating ratings of their friends. We also found peers were pulling down good employees by giving them lower ratings. So, we used game theory and statistics to solve this problem.
We looked at the names of people who were likely suspects. Then we used game theory. My co-author started weekly one on one sessions, where we watched for possible conflict. During this one on ones, we did not reveal the information managers had. That way, we policed the employee, as any difference from the manager’s observation was viewed with suspicion and reprimanded. So, we could make the employee honest and get more information from him.
There are situations where people lied! It might be because some think that if you pull down the top guy, you or your friend can take his place. This kind of collaboration affects the productivity of good performers. We handled such kind of behavior in our case study.
We also asked for less information whenever there was a conflict. That way, the employee found less gain by lying and, on top, risked getting punished. So, he spoke the truth. This way, we could create a culture of honesty and positivity. Employee productivity and morale went up significantly.
At another company in Pune, my co-authors and I used continuous assessment to make employees work hard. We did not use divide and rule (like usual managers) even though employees had a strong group. We made sure employees remained friends but collected information on work through continuous assessment. That way, productivity increased again.
Dr. Manish Gupte is now actively working with companies to analyze massive datasets and solutions to boost productivity and inculcate ethical appraisal practices at workplaces. Top performers can now be well recognized and get better job roles hence increasing productivity and morale.
Dr. Manish Gupte is also analyzing how middle managers can be made more honest. Game theory shows that middle managers have an incentive to say they have done many “managing.” They can couple this by showing actual worker’s effort lower. One of Manish’s friends, a founder, is not hiring middle managers for such reasons, and he is ok not scaling his business. Statistics and econometrics-based detectors for such game playing can make middle managers honest. Recognizing this game is the first step, and it solves half the problem.
We hope many more companies come forward to review their HR practices to help create better work environments where office politics do not bog down performance.
Read More about his work at:
HR policies get Math Touch
360 degree appraisal theory
Coarseness coaching
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