Do Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures? The Effect of Crises on Performance Appraisals

ABSTRACT Performance appraisals can have a large impact on organizations and individuals during crises, but they may also be biased by shortcomings in raters’ cognitive processes. Despite the importance of performance appraisals during such periods, only scant research has examined how crises affect cognitive processes in performance ratings. We address this by extending the reflective-impulsive model to develop and test a theoretical model that shows how people assess performance during a crisis. Because crises deplete people’s cognitive resources, we hypothesize that raters will form less accurate impressions of ratees’ task abilities during crises and reduce the weight they assign to ratees’ task abilities in performance ratings. We also hypothesize that raters will positively weight ratees’ team satisfaction more heavily in performance ratings during a crisis, because raters tend to use interpersonal affect as a heuristic during a crisis and feel more positive interpersonal affect toward members who are higher on team satisfaction. Data on members of in-person and virtual teams from before and during the COVID-19 crisis largely support our hypotheses. Our findings respond to calls in the performance appraisal literature to investigate environmental factors; we do so by examining the effect of a critically important environmental factor: a crisis.