By Sally Ann Moyer

Sometimes it feels like we live in a world of bigger is better. It’s tempting to want to bolster your company or yourself by naming off as many accomplishments as possible. The desire to highlight your success naturally leads you to think about it in concrete terms of how much and how many, but performance management rests on more than a numbers game. Tracking employee performance can be a test of quality, not quantity.

More actually means less when it comes to employee evaluations and performance reviews. A recent series of studies reported in the Harvard Business Review called this the Presenter’s Paradox. The studies discovered that “more is not actually better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings.” The Presenter’s Paradox accounts for this disconnect between presenter and consumer perceptions.

In the study, buyers were willing…