Effective Performance Appraisal Systems in Competitive Schools

Performance appraisal systems need to be effective in improving or sustaining employee performance, otherwise they are a sheer waste of time and money spend on development and implementation. From literature analyses, it became clear that the most significant factor in determining performance appraisal system effectiveness is the acceptance of its users. In a school setting the users are the School Head, Deputy Head, Heads of Departments and all the teachers. In carrying out the study, the researcher took a sample of ten private secondary schools and ten public secondary schools drawn from five of the ten provinces in Zimbabwe. The five provinces are Mashonaland West, Mashonaland East, Mashonaland Central, Harare and Midlands. From each of the five provinces, two private secondary schools and two public secondary schools were chosen. Purposive sampling was used to select information- rich participants for the semi-structured individual interviews. The participants in this case comprised of twenty school heads, twenty heads of departments and twenty senior teachers (ten from public secondary schools and ten from private secondary schools in each category). Stratified, Simple Random and Convenient sampling methods were used for other participants. The Questionnaire Survey was administered to three hundred teachers from private secondary schools and three hundred teachers from public secondary schools. The simple averages, percentages, Chi-Square generated by the use of SPSS 16.0 and Micro Soft Excel were used to analyse the data. Participants have shown their concerns about lack of communication, less emphasis on performance review meetings and uni-source performance evaluation system. However, private secondary schools have implemented new Performance Appraisal system with more emphasis on training. In public secondary schools, teachers are concerned about their training needs and comprehensive performance evaluation. Current research in this paper, has explored number of operational issues regarding ineffective communication between heads and teachers. The study showed that reality was far from the ideal. Heads stressed time pressure. Teachers are less motivated because they are not been encouraged by their heads. Appraisal process is ambiguous because of no clear guidance for conducting it. Teachers and heads use to hesitate performance reviews for avoiding potential conflicts and incompetence of department heads because of no training for this process. The survey and interview findings clearly suggested that there is a need to improve the mechanisms and procedures for the management and implementation of the teacher appraisal process in Zimbabwe by training both the appraisees and appraisers, making the whole process transparent by providing feedback to all stakeholders, especially the appraisees, and reviewing the appraisal system. It is evident that this matter urgently requires major steps being taken. In other words, an effective teacher appraisal system should enable teachers to gain more knowledge and skills so that they may be empowered and thus confident in their service delivery.