Acquaintanceship and the discrepancy between supervisor and self-assessments

It has been suggested that the discrepancy between positive self-assessments and other raters' more negative assessments may reflect not a self-leniency bias, but rather the fact that the raters do not know the ratees well enough. The present study examined this possibility in natural organizational settings. Eighty-seven supervisors assessed 105 salespeople on three dimensions. In addition, self-assessments on the same dimensions and salespeople's productivity scores were obtained. The results showed, as expected, that the self-assessments were more positive than the supervisors' assessments in the low acquaintance group but not in the high acquaintance group. The correlational analyses also showed that, in comparison to the low acquaintance setting, the supervisors were able to make more accurate assessments when they knew the ratee better. However, the mean comparisons showed that unfamiliar supervisors underestimated, and the familiar supervisors overestimated, the ratees' productivity. It was concluded that it may be ill-founded to regard self-assessments as too lenient by default, and that acquaintanceship may also pull supervisor ratings in a positively-biased direction.