In my experience employee reviews are typically de-motivational. My employer has me rate my team members on a scale from 1 to 6 on a variety of work related criteria. The basis for getting a raise rests on the employees ability to increase their ratings on a review to review period. It's horrible (and I've told them I think so).
The entire ratings system is ripe to be exploited by people who know how to play the game. This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. I had to witness the worst developer on my team become the highest paid because he knew how to sell himself and could speak a language that upper management understood.
I'm more in favor of (arguably) less subjective methods of determining an employees worth (like Bioware's RPG style ratings, or Joel Spolsky's ladder). There's still room for person bias, but at least there's less room.
My situation is similar; the manager who decides on reviews for our "team" THINKS he's technical, but he's basically useless. He hinders communication between team members, reassigns people to projects arbitrarily and without warning, and has had a 100% attrition rate for his team since he joined it. No one, even folks on other teams, have had good experiences working with him, because the one thing that he does NOT do is work to remove barriers that we developers have to face in order to get our jobs done. (He creates far more barriers than he removes.)
And yet HE is the one who evaluates OUR performance... making the entire process a waste of time.
To top it off, he isn't even honest in his reviews... as far as I can tell it's all politics for him, basically doing anything he can to shift blame down from him onto us.
This is why everyone's review should include feedback from peers and, where applicable, subordinates.
It's also a good argument for including discussions with your boss's boss in your review, to avoid a poor but politically savvy manager being able to competely filter feedback from everyone below them to the higher-ups who could do something about that poor manager in the middle.
The entire ratings system is ripe to be exploited by people who know how to play the game. This is especially bad if non-technical people are reviewing technical people. I had to witness the worst developer on my team become the highest paid because he knew how to sell himself and could speak a language that upper management understood.
I'm more in favor of (arguably) less subjective methods of determining an employees worth (like Bioware's RPG style ratings, or Joel Spolsky's ladder). There's still room for person bias, but at least there's less room.