Evaluation Interviews and Organisational Changes
Marc-Arthur Diaye 1 , Nathalie Greenan 2 (corresponding author) and Julie Rosaz 3 .

Extended abstract
Evaluation interviews or formal appraisal systems are a usual employer practice in OCDE countries. Murphyand Cleveland (1991) show that about 90% of large private firms in the US use formal appraisal systems andaround 75% of public organisations. Diaye and Greenan (2008) using an agency theory framework show that
subjective evaluation by supervisors through formal appraisal systems has two main functions: ex ante
selection of workers for work organisation purposes and ex post evaluation of performance. A firm using
formal appraisal systems attracts workers with lower effort disutility. These employees working more than
expected increase their probability of having a good performance evaluation. Evaluation interviews can also
be used as a solution for free-riding problem in team work. The first survey in France studying evaluationinterviews is the 1997 linked employer/employee survey on Organisational Changes and Computerisation(C.O.I.). Crifo, Diaye and Greenan (2004) find that evaluation interviews cover 52% of employees in French
manufacturing firms over 50 employees in 1997 and study their relationships with task discretion andteamwork. Diaye, Greenan et Urdanivia (2008) explore in more detail the employee outcomes of evaluationinterviews in terms of productive and cognitive effort, wages settings and work overload. However the 1997
C.O.I. survey is limited to the manufacturing sector. The 2006 edition of the C.O.I. survey covers the whole
private sector.
In a first section of the paper, we analyse the determinants of performance appraisals in France with a focus
on organisational changes. We benchmark our results obtained with employee level data against the ones
obtained by Brown and Heywood (2005) using Australian establishment data from the Australian Workplace
Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS, 1995) and by Addison and Belfield (2008) using British establishment
data from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS, 2004). We take into account employee leveland employer level determinants. At the employee level, we take into account socio-demographic factors(gender, age, and education) as well as the characteristics of the employment relationship (occupation,tenure, employment security and performance related pay) and work organisation features like task discretionand teamwork. At the employer level we characterise the structure of the workforce (gender composition,occupational and age structure), HRM practices (HRM department, turnover rate, further training) andstructural factors (size, sector, share of labour costs and union presence). We also introduce two types oforganisational change indicators: one based on answers given by employers and another one based on
employee declarations. At the employer level, we create three measures of change: change in ICT uses,change in use of management tools and perception of a major organisational change from the point of viewof the management. In the employee level surveys, interviewees declare whether they have experienced
changes in their work environment: changes in the technology used, changes in work organisation andchanges in the management structure. Moreover we distinguish between workers with or without
management or supervisory responsibility and between team workers and individual workers. The results
show that the determinants of evaluation interviews in France are similar to the ones observed in the UK andAustralia, with one exception. The proportion of workers on fixed term contact at the establishment is
positively correlated with the use of formal appraisal systems in UK whereas workers with fixed term
contracts are less frequently evaluated in France (the correlation is not significant in Australianestablishments). We also observe major differences in determinants depending on the management orsupervisory role of the employee and/or on his involvement in team work. In France, like in UK or Australia,organisational change positively affects the incidence of evaluation interviews. Furthermore, employee levelmeasures of change have a stronger influence than employer level ones. We are going to investigate morethoroughly these differences between employer level and employee level measures of change.
1 ENSAI, Centre d'Etudes de l'Emploi, Marc-Arthur.Diaye@ensai.fr.

2 Corresponding author : Centre d’études de l’emploi and TEPP (FR n°3126, CNRS).Address: 29
promenade Michel Simon 93 166 Noisy-Le-Grand, France.
Phone number: +331 45 92 69 58
Nathalie.Greenan@cee-recherche.fr
3 GATE – University of Lyon, rosaz@gate.cnrs.fr

In a second section of the paper, we study the use of formal appraisal systems as a management tool incontexts of changes at the workplace. We start from a theoretical framework where evaluation interviews areused by employers to generate signals directed toward employees. Is the signal sent to employees different in
a context of change? In the C.O.I survey, four employee outcomes of evaluation interviews are considered:wages, training opportunities, promotion and other outcomes. The employee declarations about
consequences of evaluation interviews are indications of the type of signal received: about expected effort,
expected skill obsolescence, expected mobility or other type of signal like fairness criterion. We use a
multivariate probit model to explain simultaneously the non exclusive different consequences of evaluationinterviews. Our preliminary results show that changes measured at the employee level increase all types ofperceived consequences. However results are stronger for employees working in team. We also notedifferences among the types of changes that are measured. Technological changes have no consequences for
employees with management or supervisory responsibilities while the reverse is true for organisationalchanges: they have no consequences on employee with no management or supervisory responsibilities.
Changes in the management structure are perceived as having no impact for both managerial and nonmanagerial staff. We find no impact of employer level measures of change in ICT uses or in uses ofmanagement tools, on the employees’ perception of the consequences of evaluation interviews. But theemployer dummy variable indicating a major organisational change from the point of view of management
increases the perception of the consequences of evaluation interviews for employees with management orsupervisory responsibilities. We intend to deepen the understanding of these preliminary results in relation
with our theoretical framework and from a methodological standpoint, we are going to look more closely
into endogeneity issues and into issues of data weighting for complex sampling frames.
Keywords: M50, M54.
JEL Classification: Subjective evaluation, personnel economics, workplace changes.
REFERENCES
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