What rating approach typically leads to inflated evaluations across the board?

The leniency rating approach typically leads to inflated evaluations because it involves supervisors or evaluators giving predominantly high ratings to employees. This method is often influenced by a desire to maintain positive relationships, foster good morale, or avoid confrontation. As a result, rather than providing constructive criticism or addressing areas for improvement, evaluators may excessively favor good performance, even when it may not truly reflect the employee’s actual performance levels.

In practice, this can result in a lack of differentiation in performance levels across a team, where most ratings may cluster at the high end of the scale. This can be detrimental to organizational effectiveness, as it fails to identify high performers and may also lead to complacency among employees.

In contrast, other approaches like central tendency might lead to most employees being rated around the middle range, while strictness would see evaluations skewed towards lower ratings. The recency effect tends to influence ratings based on an employee's most recent performance rather than overall performance throughout the review period. These approaches do not inherently inflate evaluations as leniency does.