The manager of a group of marketing specialists at a retail company is known as an individual who thinks that performance appraisals are a waste of time. On all of the performance appraisals that she conducted last year, she only completed the quantitatively based rating scale, and she did not give any of her employees goals for the upcoming year. It is again time for her to conduct performance reviews, and HR is concerned about the quality of the reviews that she will complete. Based on this situation, which of the reasons why performance appraisals fail could be an issue for this manager?

(a) Manager may not be trained at evaluation or giving feedback.
(b) Inconsistent ratings among supervisors or other raters.
(c) Inflated ratings because she may not want to deal with "bad news."
(d) The employees do not have clear performance objectives at the beginning of the performance period.