Explain the difference between absolute and comparative systems. What are the

advantages and disadvantages to each type of system?

What will be an ideal response?

Comparative systems base the measurement on comparing employees with one another. Advantages of using relative measurement methods include: these types of measurement procedures are usually easy to explain, decisions resulting from these types of systems are fairly easy and cut and dry, and they tend to control for several biases and errors made by those rating performance better than absolute systems. Disadvantages associated with the use of relative systems include: employees usually are compared only in terms of a single overall category, and we don't have information on the relative distance between employees.

Absolute systems base the measurement on comparing employees with a prespecified performance standard. Advantages of using absolute systems include: the essay system has the potential to provide detailed feedback to employees regarding their performance, behavior checklists are easy to use and understand, and critical incidents allow supervisors to focus on actual job behavior rather than on vaguely defined traits. Disadvantages of using absolute systems include: essays are almost totally unstructured, detailed and useful feedback is difficult to extract from the numerical rating provided by a behavior checklist, and collecting critical incidents is very time consuming.