Valutazione della performance basata su aspettative: indagine comportamentale per l’individuazione dei bias in atto e la formulazione di possibili interventi
di Francesca Marzo – Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione
Fabrizio Cafaggi – Consiglio di Stato
Cecilia Colasanti – ISTAT
Performance evaluation can become for public administrations a powerful organizational tool, also in the optic of a more pervasive adoption of work for objectives, as required by post-covid smart-working implementation. By an empirical investigation and by proposing possible behavioral interventions we aimed to contribute to this path. The empirical evidence collected confirms a correlation between assessment aimed at awarding rewards and imposing sanctions and tendency to give uniform, upwardly shifted evaluations (leniency error) and a significant difference in the importance given to different items object of evaluation. We claim that the value given to different evaluation items is due to the fact that different hierarchical levels have different systems of expectations. Reasoning about the meaning of expectations as a measurement parameter is crucial to understand what expectations are taken into account and how they are incorporated into the indicators used in evaluation systems. What emerges from the analysis is that different systems of expectations are assembled without necessary converging. One possible intervention is to highlight the whole set of expectation systems and, should they diverge, understand how this can be governed in the evaluation process. Introducing peer evaluation to flank hierarchical assessment, normally used, could be a useful debiasing tool.
