Evaluating team performance

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High performance teams are essential for organizations to respond to the competitive pressures in changing domestic and global markets. High performance teams include:
-Virtual teams
-Project teams
-Product development teams
-Autonomous work teams
For most of us, cooperating with people, discussing ideas, collaborating on projects, influencing others, and working on cross-functional teams typically represents 50-75% of most workdays. Team skills are critical and those that do it well are rewarded in terms of influence, support, promotions, and bigger reviews. Those without it are avoided, shunned, or assigned to the proverbial closet. Working with people without decent team skills literally drains the energy out of the rest of team, bringing everyone down.
Difficulties in evaluating and discussing employee performance have become so common that many employees complain that feedback from supervisors is inadequate or misleading. Despite innovations such as "360-degree" and "competency-based" evaluations, surveys continue to indicate that most employees and supervisors find that performance evaluation more recently known as performance management sometimes does more harm than good.
The "360-degree" evaluation involves input not only from a worker's supervisor, but also from colleagues and even from subordinates. The practical advantage of this approach is clear: it has the potential to provide invaluable information to management, since most of a person's work is done with colleagues or subordinates, rather than with superiors. The practical disadvantage is also obvious: the need to consult many individuals adds considerable time and expense to performance evaluations.
We also need to pay attention to the ethical dimensions of this practice. In one sense allowing input from colleagues and subordinates adds accountability and empowers lower-downs to provide significant input to management. Yet this empowerment is inherently asymmetrical, since ultimately only upper management has access to evaluations and is authorized to act upon them. This asymmetry results in a number of troublesome ethical pitfalls.
One problem is the difficulty of getting objective input. Co-workers not ...