The Bell Curve in Performance Appraisal

Zimyo04 Mar, 2025Business

The “bell curve” in performance appraisal refers to evaluating employee performance by distributing them along a bell-shaped curve, where the majority of employees fall in the middle, with a smaller portion at the top and another small group at the bottom. It is essentially forcing a ranking system based on a normal distribution of abilities, also known as “forced ranking” or “stack ranking”.