After a couple of years as a senior engineering manager running bi-anual performance reviews within my department (I'm responsible for managing four squad managers), which are linked to pay raises and promotions, I've started noticing some patterns, such as:

- A tendency for managers to gear up more heavily with negative rather than positive feedback prior to reviews to reinforce their evaluations

- A tendency of some reportees to play the performance review game, focusing on keywords and using selected past experiences to justify high performance behavior

- High expectaions of raises/promotions every performance review, i.e. twice a year

- Anxiety and frustration related to recurrence and size of pay raises and promotions

- Subpar experience for the team. I would like for them to have a more fufilling and impactful performance review experience.

Some references suggest to separate discussions of raises and promotions from performance review, but the literature feels lacking more real world examples:

- https://www.gallup.com/workplace/249332/harm-good-truth-performance-reviews.aspx

- https://hbr.org/2014/01/stop-basing-pay-on-performance-reviews

So what's your take on this? Do your company separate them? What would it look like? Are you having a mostly positive or negative performance review experience?

Thanks in Advance.