Examination And Measurement Of Halo Via Curvilinear Regression: A New Approach To Halo

Much disagreement and confusion has surrounded the nature of the relationship between halo and performance rating accuracy. Traditionally, the relationship has been assumed to be linear (Cooper, 1981), but Fisicaro (1988) proposed that the relationship between halo and performance rating accuracy is, instead, curvilinear. Using the halo index suggested by Balzer & Sulsky (1992), the results of the present study provided empirical evidence to support Fisicaro's proposal. Future research examining the relationship between halo and accuracy should consider the use of quadratic models, instead of linear ones. For the practitioner, this result implies that low rating dimension intercorrelations (negative halo) may lead to inaccuracy in ratings in much the same way as do high rating dimension intercorrelations (positive halo).