Job Performance Models

Specifying the Content Domain of Job Performance

What constitutes job performance? This simple question becomes complex when we consider the nuances associated with it. Is it just what the organization has hired an employee to do (that is legitimate)? If so, a careful job analysis should provide the contours of what should be included when job performance of an individual is assessed. These aspects of job performance may include performance on tasks, communication, leadership, and avoiding counterproductive behaviors. Different models of job performance make distinctions among different aspects of performance. For example, one of the popular models of job performance distinguishes between task performance and contextual performance. Task performance is defined as the proficiency with which job incumbents perform activities that are formally recognized as part of their jobs, activities that contribute to the technical core of the organization. Contextual performance constitutes the activities that an individual incumbent performs that support the social environment in which the technical core must function. This distinction between task and contextual performance has been further developed in other models of job performance. Some of the models divide contextual performance to further subdimensions.

The literature on the dimensions of job performance has suffered from ambiguous conceptualizations. [Page 402]Organizational researchers have used virtually any individual differences variable that could contribute to the productivity, efficiency, or profitability of the unit or organization as a measure of job performance. Even when appropriate measures have been used to assess aspects of job performance, consistent agreement about dimensions of job performance has not been easy to achieve. To understand which measures cluster together to assess a dimension of job performance, organizational researchers have collected data on the individual measures, as well as correlated and factor-analyzed such data. Yet decades of research along these lines have not converged on any unique solution, partly because it is infeasible to collect data on all measures from the same sample of job incumbents.

Recent years have seen the use of meta-analytic methods to cumulate data across several individual studies. This enables organizational researchers to assess the covariation of several job performance measures even though not all measures may be obtained from the same sample of incumbents. A comprehensive study that included all measures used in published articles in the Journal of Applied Psychology between 1917 and 2004 (see Further Reading) found that all the different measures were positively correlated. These positive correlations suggest that there is a common factor underlying all the different measures of job performance and the different dimensions into which job performance is sliced by different researchers and practitioners. The positive correlations also imply that in general, employees who perform well in one dimension are also likely to perform well in other dimensions. Thus, organizational interventions aimed to improve one dimension are likely to have a larger impact than usually acknowledged on other dimensions.

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