Development and Psychometric Evaluation of an Instrument to Assess Health Workers Attitudes towards Annual Performance Appraisal

One of the most important characteristic of a successful performance appraisal system is its acceptability to employees. Therefore, it is necessary to use a reliable and valid tool that can specifically measure employee's attitudes towards performance appraisal.The current study aimed at developing and psychometrically evaluating an instrument to assess health workers attitudes towards annual performance appraisal.
In the current methodological study, after reviewing the existing literature on employees performance appraisal, an initial instrument containing 43 items was developed. The content validity index and content validity ratio were measured using the opinions of 10 faculty members, in the department of health service management at medical sciences universities, as well as health workers. Construct validity was measured by the exploratory factor analysis on a sample of 185 health workers of Hamedan District Health Center. Reliability of the instrument was measured by Cronbach's alpha and test-retest methods in 2-week intervals by 15 employees. The data was analyzed using SPSS version 16.
After assessing the content validity, the initial 43 items were reduced to 33 items. Exploratory factor analysis identified 6 factors: performance feedback, performance measurement, organizational contexts, training and employees’ development, performance criteria, and using the results of the appraisal. The first 2 factors were the most important dimensions of annual performance appraisal in the view of employees, explaining 25.5% of total variance. Cronbach's alpha coefficients and test-retest correlation coefficient were 0.95 and 0.93, respectively.
The resulting 33-item instrument showed acceptable psychometric properties to assess the attitude of health workers towards annual performance appraisal process; it can be used to assess and improve the various dimensions of employee performance appraisal.