An organization decides that they don’t want to spend the large amount of money to use a 360-degree survey from an established vendor and instead decides to develop their own survey. An employee in the human resource department is asked to create a list of 50 questions about different areas of leadership performance. Two of the senior managers look at the questions briefly and then send out the survey as part of a 360-degree process. Once the results come in, there is no rhyme or reason to the results. For example, one top performing leader in the organization gets perfect performance scores from some employees and very negative scores from other employees. Management is not sure if the results from the survey can be trusted or not.
2. A unit in one organization is having a lot of performance issues and senior management is not sure of the reasons for this. They don’t want to fire any employees, but they do think some of the supervisors need to improve their leadership skills. The survey is sent to five employees, which includes two supervisors and three direct reports. They are told that although the survey will be anonymous, the results of each survey will be shared with all five employees; the names will be removed from each survey, and they will all be able to see the evaluation scores on each question. When senior management sees the survey results, they find that all five employees received almost perfect scores and no useful information from the surveys can be found.
