Jtdcftul

It's not. 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 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.

I second @solarflare's answer, but I'd like to add another reasoning.

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.

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.

While comparing the performance of your "underlings" is a completely natural part of managing a team, doing it out loud is not. This is a toxic behaviour likely to have a horrible effect on morale, with no tangible benefits to boot.

So one developer is faster at a task than another; publicly shaming the latter is not going to magically increase their aptitude, it is only going to make them feel like cr@p and resent not only you but possibly also the faster coworker. You've just embarrassed them in front of everybody. And for what?

The two of them almost certainly already know who is the faster at certain tasks. The slower one does not need this to be loudly pointed out to everybody.

Do not do this!

Use tact. If you must question why someone took a long time on a task, do so by asking how it could have been achieved faster, and/or quietly decide to yourself that you will assign that category of task to the faster person next time. But public shaming, deliberate or not, is out.