The conceptualization and representation of total performance effectiveness

Viewing performance as a distribution of outcomes or behaviors leads to methods of assessing performance that diverge sharply from conventional rating methods. The distributional perspective also suggests flaws in the conventional assumption that only the mean conveys useful information about performance. Distributional assessments can be scored on a new index of Total Performance Effectiveness, which is constructed to be sensitive to differences on all distributional parameters. Data are presented which strongly support the comprehensive parametric sensitivity of this new index, and which show that even a well-constructed conventional rating method is insensitive to any distributional parameters other than the mean.