objective

'Objective' means 'fair and well-balanced'. So, if you wanted to give an objective assessment of a company's performance, you shouldn't be involved in the company in any way. If it was your brother’s company, it would be very difficult for you to give an objective assessment! Research should be objective, so that the results are not influenced by personal interests and could be repeated by other researchers. It’s important for companies to use objective criteria to evaluate staff, so that everyone accepts that the evaluation is fair and relevant and not based on personal preferences. The hardest thing of all is to be objective about yourself, of course! The opposite is ‘subjective’.

We hired an outside consultancy to produce an objective assessment of the company’s performance.

more example sentences        questions for personal practice        unit 11