A recent report compared employees’ self-evaluations to those they received from managers or direct reports. The results: Employees consistently over-rate themselves — and their bosses.

The report, conducted by the Beacon Group, collected data from more than 10,000 performance reviews over the last five years.

When employee self-evaluations were compared with managerial assessments, half gave themselves a better score than the boss. Only 33% gave themselves a lower score.

Those numbers are about what you’d expect. But what might be more troubling is how much employees overrated their managers.

Two-thirds of employees gave their boss a higher score than the manager’s own self-assessment. Only 8% gave a harsher score. Why? Despite being almost always confidential, it seems like employees still inflate evaluations out of worry that the manager will know who wrote what.

To get an accurate assessment of managers, experts recommend taking steps to ensure confidentiality, such as having it administered by an objective party like HR.

Tags: Beacon Group, performance evaluations, self-assessment