What is the concept of potential appraisal in Human Resource?

Potential appraisal is a holistic approach for studying wholesome qualities of an employee with a given intellect, personality and character. Potential appraisal is for assessing the potentialities of existing employees for higher positions and responsibilities. The feedback provided to employees could help them to improve upon and shape for future positions. The concept of Potential Appraisal can be better understood from its two objectives:

• Evaluation of an employee in his present role and making him to do his present job in better ways.
• His suitability for higher order job, promotion and higher responsibility for which his potential appraisal is done.

Steps in Potential Appraisal:

• Determination of role dimension for which an employee’s potential is to be appraised. The role dimensions can be identified by job description and specification which provide information about the responsibilities involved in a job and attributes required.
• The mechanism for appraising these attributes in an employee should be determined.
• Potential appraisal based on the scoring of attributes.
• Potential appraisal to be linked to other human resource management elements such as providing feedback, counseling, training, development and job rotation.