Weighted Raters (and Responses)
The Challenge
Client had three levels of professional employees (executive, manager, and non-supervisory professional) who were providing 360 Degree Feedback responses. The client wanted the highest level of employee (the executives) to have a weight assigned to their response that was 3 times the weight assigned to the lowest level of employee (non-supervisory professional). The weight for the middle level was to be 2 times the lowest level of employee.
The purpose of this weighting was to give greater emphasis (weight) to the responses from the higher level employees.
The Result
We utilized the employee level field in the employee database to store the weight value (3 for executives, 2 for managers, and 1 for non-supervisory professional). When feedback assignments were made (by the client), the value of the 'Rater Weight' was automatically copied to a fixed field on the questionnaire. This was automatically performed by the software and was transparent to the client. (We could have given the client the option to over-ride copied weight).
To add another wrinkle to this seemingly easy matrix, the client wanted all self-evaluations to be given the weight of 1 when combined with the evaluations from others. Again, we used a software solution to coordinate the weighting of the responses.
Interactive on-line results were generated by multiplying the value of the response times the value of the 'Rater Weight'. These values were then subsequently divided by the sum of the 'Rater Weights' for a weighted average.
Customization: One of the strengths of our software is customization. Whatever your needs, we can develop a solution for you.
We can assign weights to raters, items, and responses. You can have responses assigned values in an ascending order or descending order. Also, you can reverse the values for selected items in case you want to control for response positioning bias.