360-degree feedback : the influence of perceptions of organizational culture on upward appraisal system attitudes

At the threshold of the 21st century, organizations have reinterpreted organizational achievement factors for employees and they have started to emphasize the importance of human resources more in their organizational activities. Moreover, human resources have become a global competition element for organizations in their institutional environments. For that reason, organizations have to manage their human resources in a better way to motivate their employees and to drive their energy into organizational achievement. It is also necessary and critical to evaluate properly the performance of employees for various human resource practices such as promoting, compensating, etc. In other words since organizational achievement can be considered as a synergic sum of individual efforts, performance appraisal for improvement purpose is crucial for such an organisation. Ie army organization. The way that an organization measures and evaluates individual employee performance will directly effect organizational achievement. Therefore, evaluation results should reflect the factual evidences about the performance of organizations at the unitary level. To produce iii objective appraisal results, it is necessary to combine evaluations of all stakeholders involved in the process. It is also important to have positive perception of organization wide on the appraisal methods. This study discusses 360-degree feedback and upward appraisal systems that provide supervisors the opportunity to increase their self-awareness. This will also help them to improve their leadership conducts by having feedback from various sources. The system will also increase individual commitment of subordinates by giving them chance to express their opinions about supervisors, and thus, to participate more in the decision making process which is likely to create a higher level of motivation. However if organizations try to implement 360-degree feedback or upward appraisal system without studying the organizational culture, their effort may be futile. This thesis aims at identifying attitudes toward 360-degrees feedback and upward appraisal systems. It also tries to provide a general profile of organizational climate for Turkish Army through perceptions of Army officers.