For the past few decades, universities in many countries have been required to adopt systematic
performance appraisal systems to increase quality and effectiveness of academics’ performances. In line with
much effort expended to examine aspects of effective performance appraisals and how appraisal processes
likely influence academics’ performance, increasing attention has been paid to empirically study how intra-
individual psychological factors and cultural orientations at the individual level are related to performance
appraisal. With the aim to develop knowledge of self-efficacy in relation to academic performance appraisal
from a cross-cultural perspective, this exploratory study through an online survey investigated relationships
between academics’ self-efficacy for research, self-efficacy for teaching, self-efficacy for performance appraisal,
trust in performance appraisal, and cultural orientation at the individual level. The study proposes a newly
conceptualised construct, “self-efficacy for appraisal”, and reports the first attempt to examine this construct in
universities. The main results pointed to positive association of self-efficacy for research, self-efficacy for
teaching, and trust in appraisal with self-efficacy for appraisal. These relationships together appear never to
have been proposed previously in the literature.