360 Assessments: Reducing Rater Leniency Bias with Relative Card Sorting

In today’s competitive business landscape, organizations are constantly looking for ways to evaluate and develop their employees effectively. One popular method is the use of 360 assessments, which provide a comprehensive view of an individual’s behaviors by gathering feedback from multiple sources. However, it is crucial to address the issue of rater leniency bias – the tendency of raters to rate individuals more positively or leniently than their actual performance warrants.

Leniency bias can harm the learner’s value from the investment in 360 assessments, as inflated ratings may lead to inaccurate conclusions about an individual’s strengths and areas for improvement.

To combat rater leniency bias, TalentTelligent utilizes an innovative virtual card sorting approach to provide a relative assessment of how a learner demonstrates key behaviors that drive effectiveness at work. This approach requires more intentional thought on the part of the raters while encouraging honest and objective evaluations. The relative virtual card sorting approach invites raters to differentiate the degree to which they observe key behaviors, from Highest to Lowest in effectiveness and therefore reduces the subjectivity inherent in traditional Likert scale rating formats.

The Importance of Rater Education

Practitioners know the value that valid and reliable 360 assessments provide while also understanding these projects require an investment of time, energy, and effort to ensure success. Therefore, training and educating raters on the importance of providing fair and unbiased evaluations is paramount. Raters need to understand their role in providing constructive feedback based on observed behaviors rather than personal biases or perceptions. By fostering a culture of fairness and objectivity within an organization, companies can ensure that 360 assessments yield meaningful insights into individual performance.

To aid our partners, we provide a variety of educational tools from training videos, FAQs, and pre-assessment communication templates to help accelerate the rater training initiative. Why? Because this process is foreign to most raters. When deployed in a timely manner, each 360 project gets off to a strong start as awareness is raised about objectively assessing employees.

The Relative Card Sorting Approach: A Powerful Tool to Reduce Rater Leniency Bias

Administering a Relative Card Sorting assessment is crucial in user experience research and design. By employing this method, our partners gain valuable insights into how users prioritize their feedback through an intuitive and user-friendly interface. With its straightforward approach, the relative card sorting exercise streamlines the process of organizing feedback and ensures that the design aligns perfectly with the target audience’s needs and expectations. Further, the content provided in each assessment is unique to the audience whether a Leader, Manager, Individual Contributor, Team, or High Potential.

The Benefits and Limitations of Using Relative Card Sorting in 360 Assessments

The benefits of using the relative card sorting approach are quite vast from our perspective and include:

• Allowing individuals to group and prioritize behaviors based on their own perception of similarity, relevance, and importance.
• Reducing rater leniency in a manner that provides differentiated data for the coach and learner.
• Providing learners with more valuable insights that streamline their developmental decision-making process.
• Inviting raters into a flexible and adaptable process leads to a more accurate and personalized outcome.
• Extending card sorting methodologies promotes user engagement and satisfaction as the user feels more connected to the content and feels a sense of ownership over its structure.

While the benefits are clear, there are also limitations that must be understood and include:

• Raters will experience a new approach to the collection of data that is unique to their experience with traditional Likert scales.
• Relative card sorting requires additional thought to be dedicated by raters. This creates what we refer to as a “positive tension” as the outcomes of this dedication are a gift to learners.

A Final Reflection: Leveraging Relative Card Sorting to Enhance Fairness and Accuracy in 360 Assessments

After providing assessment feedback to over 250,000 learners, we’ve learned the relative card sorting approach is a powerful and effective way to make data-driven developmental decisions. When ensuring that key stakeholders, learners, and raters are all accurately informed and trained on this unique approach, our partners find that their learners’- satisfaction with the accuracy of feedback is noticeable.

While 360 assessments offer valuable insights into employee development, we believe it is essential to address rater leniency bias when utilizing rating scales. By implementing clear rating criteria and providing training for raters, organizations can reduce this bias and enhance the effectiveness of their assessment processes. Ultimately, this will lead to more accurate evaluations that drive growth and development within the workforce.