Elsevier

Applied Soft Computing

Volume 7, Issue 3, June 2007, Pages 936-945
Applied Soft Computing

A fuzzy-based military officer performance appraisal system

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2006.03.003Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a computer-based group decision support system—fuzzy group decision support system (FGDSS), which include three ranking methods (intuition ranking, Lee and Li's fuzzy mean/spread and metric distance) to provide more transparent information and help manager to make better decision under fuzzy circumstance. First, we derive metric distance to rank fuzzy numbers, and we execute some simulation experiments to validate the proposed method. A practical numerical example is introduced to illustrate those three methods and compared with different alternatives by FGDSS.

Introduction

In recent years, as the economy has developed rapidly and the various companies have gradually had certain scales, how to match the development of organization, grasp the proper talents and develop the potential of the personnel inside the organization, has become one of the subjects that the companies are concerned with and also has impelled the human resource management (HRM) to become the important factor for advancing the competitive power of the companies [1], [2], [12], [25]. The objective of personnel performance are: (1) objective on management, for example, to encourage the director to observe the subordinates’ performance more carefully to become a better director of work; to provide the information about personal raises, promotion, assignment, training and retirement; to provide document description to the subordinates who may take legal actions. (2) Objective on development, for example, to recompense the subordinates’ performance to encourage them; to provide the information about how to improve the working performance; to provide the subordinates with the opportunity to show their expectation, attempt, satisfaction or dissatisfaction about the work; to develop the potential of organization members and program of personal career. (3) Objective on research, for example, to estimate the effect of training and selection; to provide relative information about human resource research.

To bring the objectives of performance appraisal into full play, the selection of performance index is very important, because whether the index is chosen properly or not concern whether the performance of the appraised can be estimated objectively and comprehensively, and a set of highly reliable and effective performance appraisal rules and model, not only can enhance the reasonability and objectivity of the performance appraisal, but also can promote the personnel's morale, to obtain the maximum management effect. However, since the standard is always affected by the working content and character, the complexity of organization, group or individual duty and its division and the time direction of the appraisal standard. Bernardin and Beatty [2], Dessler [12] and Myers [25] pointed out that the usual problems that occur during the performance appraisal course include: (1) disturbance of unspecific performance standard; (2) disturbance of halo effect; (3) disturbance of concentrative current; (4) disturbance of excessively broad or strict performance. What the conventional criticism of performance appraisal is the lack of quantitative index as well as it is not easy to express the feeling of the appraiser precisely, because it is full of uncertainty and simulation. As a result, the performance appraisal often makes people feel the injustice of black-box operation.

Carlsson and Fuller [4], [5] introduced the concept of interdependence in multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), and some researchers showed that fuzzy set theory [28] could be successfully applied to resolve multiple criteria problems [10], [23], [26], [27]. In general, the appraisal from among two or more people is a multiple criteria decision making problem. Under many situations, the values for the qualitative criteria are often imprecisely defined for the decision makers. Besides, the desired value and importance weight of criteria are usually described in linguistic terms, e.g. “very poor”, “medium”, “fair”, “very good”, etc. It is not easy to precisely quantify the rating of each candidate and the precision-based methods as stated above are not adequate to deal with the performance appraisal problem. This fuzziness in the performance appraisal process motivates us to develop a fuzzy decision making method to solve the problem of ranking fuzzy numbers.

So, this research attempts to use fuzzy synthetic appraisal approach to set up the model that simulates the thinking logic when the appraiser makes performance decision and developed a fuzzy group decision support system—FGDSS as an assistant tool to increase appraisal productivity and make the appraised result more transparent, logical and reasonable.

There are several fields of methods for solving MCDM problems. Due to the complexity of these algorithms, previous researchers usually develop the group decision support system (GDSS) for implementing these algorithms. According to Eom [16], this finding of GDSS can be broadly categorized into a generalized data-oriented MCDSS which is based on multiattribute decision making models [20], a model-oriented MCDSS which is based on multiple objective decision making models [13], [15] and data-oriented MCDM GDSS [3] and negotiation support systems [19]. In this paper, the FGDSS is the kind of model-oriented MCDSS. Referenced to the MCDSS literatures [13], [30], we can see that this topic still has great influence in the recent years.

This paper is organized in six sections. Following this introduction, Section 2 presents a brief overview of the appraisal criteria of military officer. Section 3 presents a brief overview of the multiple criteria analysis and deriving fuzzy numbers ranking methods. We also use 12 simulation experiments to validate the proposed metric method [8] in this section. In Section 4, we illustrate an example, Section 5 a computer-based decision support system is developed to solve the performance appraisal problem under different alternatives. Finally, we give some conclusion at the end of this paper.

Section snippets

The performance appraisal model of military officer

The performance appraisal refers to that the organization makes systematic estimation of the personnel's working ability and performance as the basis for inspiring and developing the human resource of the organization and the impulsion for extending the life of the organization. According to the objectives of performance appraisal mentioned above, the military officer's performance appraisal can be defined as the process to make valuate judgment and determination about the military officer's

Fuzzy number and ranking of fuzzy numbers

This section briefly introduces the concept of fuzzy numbers and some popular methods for ranking the fuzzy numbers.

Practical numerical example—performance appraisal for military officer

An anonymous military unit, there are four military officers to be appraised; the committee used the hierarchy evaluation model from the official rules, which are shown in Appendix A. Those four officers’ related records for pass year was reviewed by E1, E2 and E3, who are the evaluation committee. After discussion the weight for these criteria is equal (all higher level and subcriteria are 0.2), i.e. loyalism and soldierly virtues are the subcriteria of thinking, so their weights are all the

The FGDSS

As more and more decisions in real organizational settings are made by groups, applying fuzzy set theory into multiple criteria decision making methods for dealing with imprecision, uncertainty and fuzziness in group decision making has become a hot research topic in current fuzzy set and MCDM research [9]. The application of fuzzy set theory in supporting group decision making can improve the decision quality and leads to a high degree of group consensus. For helping manager can easier compare

Conclusions

In the military officer's performance appraisal, very often, the assessment of officer with respect to criteria and the importance weights of criteria are given by decision makers in linguistic terms. In this situation the concepts of fuzzy numbers can be applied to evaluate and rank without any constraints. In this paper, we developed a fuzzy group decision making system—FGDSS to solve the military officer's performance appraisal problem.

In this GSS we adopted three different methods to rank

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