Journal of Applied Psychology 1982, Vol. 67, No. 6, 873-876 Copyright 1982 by the American Psychological Association, inc. 0021-9010/82/67064W73S00.75 Performance Evaluation in a Dynamic Context: A Laboratory Study of the Impact of a Prior Commitment to the Ratee Max H. Bazerman School of Management, Boston University Rafik I. Beekun Graduate School of Industrial Administration Carnegie-Mellon University F. David Schoorman University of Maryland A dynamic view of performance evaluation is proposed that argues that raters who are provided with negative performance data on a previously promoted employee will subsequently evaluate the employee more positively if they, rather than their predecessors, made the earlier promotion decision. A total of 298 business majors participated in the study. The experimental group made a pro- motion decision by choosing among three candidates, whereas the control group was told that the decision had been made by someone else. Both groups evaluated the promoted employee's performance after reviewing 2 years of data. The hy- pothesized escalation of commitment effect was observed in that the experimental group consistently evaluated the employee more favorably, provided larger re- wards, and made more optimistic projections of future performance than did the control group. After a long history of attempting to identify optimal performance appraisal instruments and techniques (cf. Landy & Farr, 1980), recent re- search has moved towards studies that describe the processes involved in making a judgment about performance (Borman, 1975; Feldman, 1981; Schneier, 1977; Zedeck & Kafry, 1977). This article represents this latter paradigm and specifically addresses the dynamic processes that occur within a rater across multiple judgments of the same ratee. It is concerned with a longitudinal view of the rating process in order to focus on judgmental demands associated with rating the same ratee at multiple points in time. This article presents: (a) a brief review of the trend towards understanding rating processes, (b) presentation of a longitudinal viewpoint, (c) development of a set of hypotheses from this new viewpoint, and (d) discussion of the results of the empirical test of these hypotheses. The traditional view of performance evaluation assumes that a rater has both a complete set of information about the behavior of the ratee and an organizationally provided performance ap- praisal instrument. The instrument provides the The authors thank Lloyd Baird and two anonymous reviewers for critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Max H. Baz- erman, 621 Commonwealth Avenue, School of Man- agement, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215. rater with the questions to be answered about a particular ratee. The rater searches through the information available, identifies all behaviors per- tinent to the questions to be answered, integrates all this information in a summary evaluation, and provides the rating response that most closely ap- proximates the summary evaluation. From a psy- chometric viewpoint, such evaluations can be rep- resented as consisting of a true score and an error term (Nunnally, 1967). The error term can be dichotomized into systematic and nonsystematic components. The latter have typically been con- sidered to be randomly distributed, whereas the systematic portion has been seen to result from certain biases of the rater (e.g., the halo effect). Recent research has sought to move beyond the identification of these systematic biases by at- tempting to provide process models that explain why these biases occur. Attention has focused on identifying the information acquisition, infor- mation integration, and judgmental process that raters perform in making an evaluation. A pri- mary goal of this research direction has been to determine the processes within the rater that lead to error in the evaluation system. Such identifi- cation may be potentially useful in training evalu- ators to eliminate error. Although recent attempts at developing a cog- nitive model of the rater have greatly improved our understanding of the performance evaluation process, these attempts have been made within a static perspective. Both the traditional view of performance evaluation and more recent cogni- 873