Upon Further Review …

The annual employee performance review is as ingrained in corporate culture as coffee breaks and weekly department meetings. But some observers see a big difference between job appraisals and those other corporate mainstays: the latter actually have some value.A radical viewpoint? Perhaps. But when all is said and done, there’s little in the way of academic research that proves traditional performance appraisals do what they’re intended to do, says Ron Baker, the founder of the VeraSage Institute, a think tank devoted to educating business professionals (www.verasage.com). Yet studies show that 97 percent of American companies and organizations still use them