Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)

ANGELO S. DENISI, W. ALAN RANDOLPH and ALLYN G. BLENCOE: Potential Problems with Peer Ratings

ANGELO S. DENISI, W. ALAN RANDOLPH AND ALLYN G. BLENCOL: Potential Problems with Peer Ratings Academy of Management Journal, 26 (1983) 457-464 Peer ratings can be defined as the set of evaluations obtained by having each member rate every other member of a work group, using a specific set of rating scales. A considerable amount of research has been conducted on peer ratings and peer evaluations in general (Brief, 1980; Kane & Lawler, 1978, 1980). However, virtually no research has been reported on how people react on learning they have been either poorly or favorably evaluated by their peers. What effects do these ratings, or other types of peer evaluations (especially when they are negative) have on subsequent interactions, feelings, performance, and any future evaluations? There is a theoretical basis for anticipating problems following an individual's receiving negative evaluations from peers. Balance, or consistency theories (Osgood & Tannenbaum, 1955; Rosenberg, Hovland, McGuire, Abelson, & Brehm, 1960), for example, would suggest that learning someone has evaluated an employee more poorly than he/she would evaluate himself/herself will lead to "source derogation" (Tannenbaum, 1978), or the lowering of the employee's opinion of the rater and any subsequent evaluations of that rater. The notion of reciprocity in social exchange (Adams, 1965) also suggests that one would "repay" a peer for a poor rating by later giving poor ratings to that peer. Finally, consistency theories would lead one to expect other outcomes following source derogation. For example, there is reason to believe that learning of poor peer evaluations will result in those peers becoming less interpersonally attractive (Kiesler & De Salvo, 1976), which tends to reduce cohesiveness among group members 'The authors wish to thank Dean Mcintosh for extensive comments on an earlier version of this paper.