I had this manager that frequently brought up how team members performed compared to each other during one-on-ones or performance reviews. E.g. "A could do this task in half an hour you took three hours on" or "I can not give you a better performance review because B delivered much more than you did and I am giving them an average review already."
Now the tone on the examples aside how acceptable is it to bring up other team members while discussing performance?
If I'm evaluating your performance then Bob and Alice have no bearing on the review. Now truthfully I'm human and I may think of comparisons to each other (and to other people I've worked with over the years) but I need to deliver my evaluation about you in as unbiased a form as I can.
It's the same principle that applies when I reprimand you and you bring up Bob and Alice.
Bob and Alice aren't there. It's just the two of us.
This is a MAJOR red flag and an indication of toxic management.
I would seriously consider either completely ignoring the fact that this manager is trying to divide and conquer or find another job.
There is a reasonably well-known practice called stack ranking, where businesses explicitly and intentionally compare employees, in an attempt to get rid of a small percentage of unproductive ones, and reward a small percentage of exceptional ones.
Your manager's statement “I can not give you a better performance review because B delivered much more than you did and I am giving them an average review already” sounds a bit stack-ranking-esque to me, and might indicate that your company is doing that.
Stack ranking is often criticised as being really destructive for morale. That's certainly how I felt in a job many years ago, where I believed I'd put in a year's worth of really good effort and done everything we'd agreed, only to be told I couldn't get a top ranking (and therefore a higher pay rise) because another (very deserving) team member already was, and there was only one top spot allocated on the curve.
Of course, this might not be a considered company-wide approach to performance measurement — I don't think that employees are traditionally told about other specific employees' ranks in a stack ranking system, and it would usually be reasonable to expect discussions in one-on-ones to remain reasonably private. If it is just your manager doing this, and only doing it in private one-on-one conversations, that doesn't sound like particularly good leadership.
However — if the company actually does want to directly compare employee performance, maybe to encourage competition and/or collaboration to drive improvements overall, there's no reason why they can't do that. Sports teams (rowing is an especially good example) have very intense metric-based competition between team members, who also have to very closely collaborate to succeed.
Obviously it's difficult to translate that to knowledge work, where the performance metrics are much vaguer, but the problem of a team with both internal competition and internal collaboration is the same, and some comparison of team members with each other — hopefully in a less negative and divisive way than you've described — could be a part of a successful approach to solving it.
There are some good answers already, but they each seem to capture only part of what is quite a complex answer.
There are many reasons why it might not be a good idea to directly compare staff members in a one-to-one performance review:
However, there are also reasons why it can sometimes be a good idea to compare staff directly:
In addition, discussing or comparing to other staff in a one-to-one or performance review can be desirable for other reasons:
Finally, in response to the inevitable (hysterical) "quit your job!!!" answer, consider how likely it is that management in your next company will be perfect. If a manager telling you "Alice is doing a better job than you, but you're doing better than Bob" is the worst thing that happens at a company, it might still be an OK place to work.
In summary, this is a complex question that resists simple soundbite answers. Depending on context and how it is done, it may be a poor choice on the manager's part, or there may be a good reason for it.
There was just an article in the New Yorker about the two top engineers at Google and how they complemented each other. They ALWAYS paired together. (Sorry if I get some of this wrong, it's from memory)
The article claimed that they were the prime example of how one great programmer could do the equivalent of 10 normal programmers and together saved the entire company repeatedly solving problems that nobody else could.
It sounded from the article as though one of them generally typed and the other often sat there with his feet up on the desk and thought.
Imagine the effect trying to pit them against each other or force them to identify who did what work so they could promote/adjust pay/fire one or the other... it would be absolutely destructive. It would have ended the company.
So I'd say that if it was acceptable by your company, you should try to correct that or leave. You might stick around and slog through it like BittermanAndy suggests, but it's not a practice that shows any understanding of software development teamwork so be ware.
I suppose that it's also similar to rating your basketball team only on baskets per player because assists don't score anything. Would it be better to get rid of players who don't score as much or figure out that you are scoring wrong? And making this mistake publicly in front of the whole team when they can all easily see how wrong you are???
I second @solarflare's answer, but I'd like to add another reason.
Do consider that maybe the only inappropriate aspect is giving names explicitly. Rephrasing to "I can reasonably tell the task you took 3 hours could have been done in 1 hour" or "I cannot give you a better review, because of the standards I follow, which also normalizes every employee's review". Would that sound bad to you?
My point is that I believe comparing team members explicitly is poor ethics, but for all practical purposes, the same message could have been sent without the comparison, which would have been made either way.
On the plus side, you are given the opportunity to dispute the comparisons, saying things such as "A took less time because his task was actually simpler" or "I actually helped B a lot in delivering the tasks that you are attributing to him". Likewise, these answers do lack professionalism, but so does the person evaluating you.
I do believe this is not a reason to find another job, but coaching managers into giving proper feedback is pretty much a HR responsibility, maybe seek the HR department with some constructive suggestions.
You did not have a manager. You had an excuse for a manager.
The reason that your "manager" failed as a manager goes much deeper than the simple fact of telling you that Bob got the raise, and you didn't, because Bob made X widgets last year/quarter/month, and you didn't. That is merely the cherry at the top of the bonehead sundae.
Making performance review a competitive affair was itself an exercise in idiocy. No surer recipe for distrust, resentment, and in-fighting was ever created than turning employee compensation into a zero-sum game.
We can go further. Performance review is itself inherently flawed. It assumes that employees are in full control of their performance, when the truth is that employees typically control only a few of the factors that influence performance. In practice, the only reliable result of performance review is to cripple the morale of employees who receive bad reviews.
On top of all this, your manager's performance improvement toolbox seems to have sticks and carrots—with emphasis on the former, I'll wager—and nothing else. Any idiot can hand out rewards and punishments. That is not a skill set that merits anything above the minimum wage. When management really cares about improving performance (instead of caring only about looking like they're doing something), they look into what the better employee is doing differently, and try to implement that employee's methods, techniques, and practices on a wider scale, and make sure that every employee receives the necessary support for their job.
It might be a good thing if it is presented in a positive way : two employers ago I have been working in a project team and every week somebody was elected by the project manager as the "employee of the week", meaning the person who has done something exceptionally good. There have been cases where two people had done something exceptionally good and the project manager exceptionally elected both.
But saying something negative in public is a show-stopper: such a thing should never happen.
In order for it to be acceptable it is necessary (but not enough) that it is a complete and accurate comparison. Which is quite a difficult thing to do. Your case shows how sloppy the comparison is with just a cursory review. It's missing a crucial element : paychecks. A is not under performing if she takes twice the time than B but gets a third of the pay. She might actually deserve a rise.
In general you won't see managers revealing your co-workers salaries. It's even illegal in many places.
Hence you are unlikely to ever see a proper comparison of team members performances. This is not to say that if the comparison was accurate and complete it would be acceptable but I have nothing to add there compared to other answers.
The act of comparing coworkers is entirely valid and a useful tool.
The issue is not that you're being compared to your peers, but that you aren't being compared against the expectations that (should) have been set with you. For example, working on commission is an example where your expectations and compensation is tied explicitly to your performance relative to your peers.
The only way that performance reviews go well is if you have a regular expectations/goal setting cadence. Then you get to be reviewed against those goals, which may or may not inlcude comparisons to your coworkers.
The comparison itself is very similar to the idea of the of normal distribution or bell curve in performance in assessment, which is perfectly fine and valid. It is to be expected that in your company you'll always find non-performers, average performers and top performers creating an unequal distribution of performance. This is not an invention of managers; this is just a natural phenomenon. In your example B is the average mediocre performer. If A underperforms according to the expectation set by a dynamic median of the curve then it is perfectly reasonable to make A aware of that fact as part of your plan to improve performance.
However, it is not useful at all to openly compare performances with coworkers present, because that's irrelevant to the improvement of the team. Team members are not supposed to compete against each other which is the implication of the open comparison. Team members are supposed to compete together for a common goal.
You'll always get non-performers, average performers and top performers, even if everybody improves substantially, hence a dynamic normal distribution of performance. But the goal of this assessment should be to improve the median performance of the team, not to make everybody a top performer, which is nonsensical, or punish them for being mediocre or non-performers.
