 We are talking about performance appraisal of international employees and in this topic we are going to talk about who are going to be the evaluators, who is going to conduct the performance appraisal. Usually performance appraisal is conducted by the immediate supervisor in traditional performance management settings. However, the job becomes a little bit complex in the international scenario. A wife, because of the geographical and physical distances, it becomes a problem because the performance of a person who is working in a foreign context cannot be observed by a person who is sitting somewhere in another country, in the parent country or in the headquarters. So that poses a problem particularly for the subsidiary CEO. So the CEO of the subsidiary, because the CEO is at the top of the subsidiary, there is no one above that national boundary. So the performance of that person is evaluated in the parent country headquarters. So the biggest problem comes from the subsidiary CEO's performance appraisal that nobody is seeing his performance. No top level manager is seeing his performance. And if someone can observe his performance, then he can do it based on statistics, he can do it based on data, he can do it based on numbers. His behavior, his interaction, his management skills, his convincing skills, his crisis management skills, no one is seeing him. So subsidiary CEO's performance appraisal, who has to do it? If he has to do it, he is not an immediate supervisor or a higher-up, but nobody is seeing his performance. Apart from that, subsidiary managers tend to be appraised for subsidiary performance against hard criteria, which may lack global orientation. So because the subsidiary CEO and subsidiary managers, their performance is not being observed by a person in subjective manner, their performance is evaluated on hard criteria. Hard criteria could be productivity, it could be the return on investment, it could be the profit of the organization, it could be the sales made, the products developed, all these hard criteria, but not the soft criteria, not the contextual performance. And therefore, because contextual performance, because the soft goals, they are very much important, particularly to set the global orientation of the organization, if that is set aside and not measurable, then it is difficult to then pinpoint that whether a subsidiary manager or subsidiary CEO has been able to perform or not. Then as we discussed in previous topics, that the performance of the subsidiary may be, has to be taken as part of a whole. The subsidiary is not a part, it is part of a whole. So sometimes what happens is that some subsidiaries, they are strategically placed and they have to remain in a background, they are less performers, just to make the strategic position of the multinational more global in the entire global scenario. We discussed that in a previous topic. So if that particular subsidiary unit is placed strategically and it is okay for that subsidiary unit to be performing lesser than required or lesser than the standards, then that also has to be taken into account that the global orientation of that particular subsidiary is for some other strategic requirement. Then appraisal of other employees that are working in that subsidiary is conducted by the subsidiary CEO or the immediate supervisor, subsidiary supervisor. So whether it is the home country nationals or it is the parent country nationals or third country nationals who are working in that multinational company, their performance is going to be appraised, is going to be evaluated by the immediate supervisor or the subsidiary CEO. But there comes a little bit of complication in expatriate performance appraisal. Expatriates who are, for example, if a person is working at finance head level, which is a subsidiary manager, a subsidiary CEO, who is not a parent country national, who is a host country national. So if that person who is working at a lower level and is an expatriate, it is possible that the person would like to be evaluated by his own country managers. So he may want to be evaluated by headquarter managers rather than the one who is immediately above that person. So expatriate performance appraisal can be conducted by the host country managers and it can also be conducted by parent country evaluators because people who are working in that expatriate position, they think that the expatriate assignment is part of their career development process and their career is not limited to that subsidiary. For example, if a UK has come to work in Pakistan, then its performance in the context of Pakistan is not only necessary, but it will be understanding to measure the performance of the UK nationals so that its career development as an international manager, as a person who has worked in a global context, that should be evaluated from the UK perspective, not from the Pakistani perspective. So sometimes some people, they expect that their performance will be, some expatriates expect that their performance is going to be measured, not by the immediate supervisor, but by somebody who is from the parent country evaluation team. So for that complication, for that complexity, the process of multiple evaluation has emerged. That has also emerged as a tool of performance management in the journal human resource literature, but it becomes even more applicable in the international human resource management process because it is better to evaluate the performance of a subsidiary manager from multiple evaluators. So you would be very much conversant with the name of 360 degree feedback and 360 degree feedbacks mean feedback from various different angles, not just from the immediate supervisor. So 360 feedback in the international context, it involves the feedback from the immediate supervisor, then the rating of the person or expatriate himself or herself and then the human resource manager, whether that HR manager is working in the subsidiary country or the HR manager is working in the headquarters, the HR manager would be involved in evaluating the performance of that person. So in usually 360 feedback involves these three people evaluating the performance of an expatriate. And survey has found that 81% of the US firms which were evaluated in that particular survey, they used more than one evaluator to evaluate the performance of an expatriate. So it is something which is also in practice and not just theoretical. So this was the discussion about who is going to be evaluating and conducting the performance appraisal of employees working in an international context.