Good day sunshine? Not so much
It is summer, or whatever passes for a summer in the UK, and in many companies, interim reviews for the staff are scheduled to take place soon. And if I’d ask you if you’d rather be reviewed by your boss on a sunny summer day or a cloudy day, which one would you choose?
Exactly, I thought the same thing.
I thought that on a sunny day, people tend to be in a better mood, so the conversation should be more pleasant and my boss should be more forgiving. All of this should lead to a better appraisal of my work in 2021 so far.
If you’d asked me, I would have even cited the famous (or should I say infamous) study by David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway that showed that stock markets have better performance on sunny days than cloudy days because people are more optimistic and willing to take on more risks.
And the result of all that sophistication on my side would have been: likely a worse assessment.
Carolyn Deller and Jeremy Michels from the University of Pennsylvania recruited volunteers from all across the United States for an experiment. They told each volunteer that they were the regional manager of a company and had to evaluate the performance of 10 sales managers. For each sales manager there was an objective measure of success, namely the revenue achieved in the previous period, and a subjective measure, namely how well the sales manager performed his or her administrative tasks like staying in touch with customers, responding to internal and external requests, etc. On top of that, the volunteers had information about the general business environment and whether customer demand was stable or volatile as customers opened and shut factories and thus the actual sales were less controllable by the sales manager.
As one would expect, the subjective score for the administrative performance of the sales managers tended to be higher when actual sales were higher. Supervisors simply aren’t objective and if the numbers are good, they automatically think that the rest of the performance must have been good as well. But interestingly, when the sales environment was hard to control by the sales manager, the subjective score for the sales manager declined somewhat. Supervisors realised that high sales in a fluid environment could be more due to luck than skill and thus corrected for this luck with a lower subjective score.
Meanwhile, if the sales manager had low sales, the subjective score for administrative performance was lower, but increased if the sales manager faced a less controllable environment. Again, the supervisors corrected for the influence of luck.
But here comes the surprising result: On cloudy days, this “correction for luck” was stronger than on sunny days. In other words, low performers got better scores when they were evaluated on a cloudy day than on a sunny day and even better scores when they were evaluated on a cloudy day and faced a market that was largely out of their control. The effect was particularly strong in states in the US north and Midwest where there is a pronounced difference between winter and summer.
Further investigations showed that what happens is that supervisors on cloudy days simply took more time to assess the performance of the sales manager and thus came to a more objective evaluation. On sunny days, however, they seemingly are eager to get out of the office and hang out in the sunshine so they just go for the top line sales number and don’t care about the rest.
So, if your evaluation is going to take place on a sunny Friday afternoon, just before your boss is heading out for a two week vacation, good luck to you.