HR topic taken from a current news article Assignment

HR topic taken from a current news article - Assignment ExampleGeneral Electric Companys CEO, tinkers dam Welsh is one of the roughly vocal proponents of this policy by claiming that this method weeds out the individuals who ar a questioning fit with the company. He is not alone in his support, 30% of Fortune cholecalciferol companies have similar policies including Ford Motor, Conco, Sun Microsystem, Cisco Systems, EDS and Enron (Lawler). They all systematically remove the bad employees on a regular basis and thereby send a strong message to the employees that there is little tolerance for poor results. Hence this forced ranking system has a big strike on the overall industry. Such a system of performance appraisal as well as provides information just about the employees that other systems do not provide, especially when it comes to their place in the company performance spectrum (Lawler). It also promotes a culture in which employees believe that the company expects nothin g but the best and those who fail to adhere to this timeworn will be shoot. This causes the employees to continually work hard and exceed their past performance (Blume, Rubin and Timothy T. Baldwin). Managers primarily avoid having difficult and painful conversations with their employees over their bad performance and try to minimize the conflict. This system literally forces the managers to address the issue of the employees thereby formalizing the management processes which only benefits the entire company (Lipman). A study print in an issue of the academic journal of Personnel Psychology tried to answer the question of whether a forced ranking system will improve the quality of the work force. In their model of degree Celsius companies with over 100 employees, they employed the system of forced ranking and found out that there was noted improvement in the work force potential over the first several years. This improvement also included lowered voluntary turnover (Grote). Ho wever, there argon many cons associated with the practice of forced ranking. It has been tell to lower employee morale, teamwork and collaboration. If there is no compelling difference between the employees in the lower end who were fired and those who were not fired, it will spread a sense of injustice (Grote). This would lower morale and the system would be viewed in a negative light. Such a system also creates a very nerve-wracking and risky work environment. This can prevent high potential employees from joining the said company as they would try to avoid that work environment (Grote). Employee performance patterns do not generally follow a normal distribution and hence identifying the bad performers is a difficult matter (Lawler). According to the news article, most employees are slightly worse than second-rate hence there is always the danger of satisfactory employees universe identified as bad employees. Some departments are better staffed than others and the poor perform ers in that group might as well be employees who were average but were surrounded by good employees and hence paled in comparison (Lawler). By repeating this process year after year, the lower quartile is eventually filled with employees who are average rather than bad performers. This can again lower the employee morale as they would feel that average employees are being misidentified and discriminated against (Donaldson). Such companies are also prone to legal challenges. Legal rulings state that a performance related