MGT3045 WK 4 Project
Forced Ranking © 2017 South University
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Human Resource Management
©2017 South University
2 Forced Ranking
Performance Management and Appraisal
Consider another example of a marketing department supervisor, Nancy Jones, who supervises a team of 25 members. Nancy uses forced ranking to identify employees who may receive raises or promotions. She needs to categorize her team members as follows: 10% of the members can be categorized as A workers, 40% as B workers, 40% as C workers, and 10% as D workers. On the surface this doesn't seem too hard for Nancy. However as the evaluation proceeds, Nancy realizes that she can actually categorize only 5% of the employees as D workers and 35% as C workers. In order to follow her instructions Nancy tries to force a few of the better performers into lower ranking, contrary to their actual ranking.
After Nancy hands in her assessment, she truly understands the
Page 3 of 3
Human Resource Management
©2017 South University
3 Forced Ranking
Performance Management and Appraisal
implications of this forced ranking. The 10% of employees that she ranked as D workers are issued warnings and asked to improve their performance within 60 days or face termination. The 40% that she ranked as C performers, including the 5% of employees that she forced into the C group despite the fact that they were B performers, are notified in writing that they may be categorized as D workers during the next evaluation cycle and therefore may face dismissal. B performers are informed that they are currently secure, but if the D category were to cease to exist, some B workers may be dropped to C, some may be upgraded to A, and others may continue to be categorized as B workers. In this case the only safe category of workers is the 10% who made it to the A group. Employees in this group will attend a management training program. So the top and bottom 10% will likely leave the department, which means that the remaining B and C workers will be redistributed in the ranking in the next performance evaluation cycle. This is only an example of how forced ranking may work. Organizations may use and manage forced ranking differently.