Also, many companies make the mistake of making performance reviews part of the transfer packet. It seems like it just makes sense (you have "data"; why not use

Also, many companies make the mistake of making performance reviews part of the transfer packet. It seems like it just makes sense (you have "data"; why not use it?) but it actually fucks up the culture. It's basically never a good idea to have past performance reviews come into play in a transfer decision. First of all, it makes individual workers have their eyes on the scoreboard (reviews) rather than the game, because there's no escaping mediocre reviews; if you get smacked, you're stuck on a team forever. (And, sometimes you have good workers who get shitty reviews to prevent flight.) Second, it slows internal mobility to a crawl, because people getting lousy reviews can't move and people getting good reviews don't want to move, lest they risk getting mediocre scores and showing "negative trend" (making promotion nearly impossible). So, collaboration stops (due to the impossibility of lateral or diagnoal movement) and departmental position becomes permanent and tribal, and you get the "warring departments" dynamic. Even if you don't agree that departmental rivalry is a bad thing, what it tends to mean is that, due to the unpredictable sabotage events, whole sectors of the company become unreliable and upper management finds itself duplicating effort and running "bake-offs", but talented people avoid bake-off projects like the plague, so you get a "Dead Sea Effect". Usually, when people talk about stack-ranking, they're also talking about Enron-style performance reviews (that is, performance reviews that are part of the transfer packet). You can theoretically have one and not the other, but they tend to go together.