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Table of Contents
1. The best and the rest (Performance)....................................................................................... 2
2. Who would you hire? (Selection) .......................................................................................... 19
3. Beyond intelligence (Personality) ......................................................................................... 33
4. Try something new (Creativity)............................................................................................. 43
5. Money, money, money (Remuneration) ............................................................................... 56
6. I feel pretty, oh so pretty (Appearance on Salary) ................................................................. 68
7. Thinking about your career (Career) ..................................................................................... 82
8. Lecture notes ....................................................................................................................... 97
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2.8C Performance at work
Problem 1 – Performance
Performance Concepts and Performance Theory
(Sonnentag and Frese)
Relevance of Individual Performance
• Company → High individual performance is relevant for the company to meet their goals
• Individual → High individual performance is a source of satisfaction, mastery, pride & financial
benefits
• Is very often a variable in organizational research (usually as a dependent variable)
Definition of Performance
• Performance as
o Action aspect (behavioural) → what an individual does in the work situation e.g.
assembles an engine or teaches kids math
o Outcome aspect of a performance → consequence or result of the individual’s behavior,
which does not only depend on the individual’s behavior e.g. teaching math perfectly
might not increase children’s scores if they have intellectual deficits
Performance as a Multi-dimensional Concept
• Task performance: individual’s proficiency which contribute to organization’s ‘technical core’
o Indirect contribution – managers or staff
o Direct contribution – production worker
• Contextual performance: do not contribute to the technical core but support the organizational,
social, and psychological environment to pursue the organizations’ goals
o E.g. helping co-workers, being reliable, suggesting how to improve work procedures
• Differentiation:
TASK PERFORMANCE CONTEXTUAL PERFORMANCE
ACTIVITIES Vary between jobs Relatively similar across jobs
RELATED TO Ability Personality and motivation
ROLES In-role behaviour Extra-role behaviour
A) Task Performance
Multi-dimensional
5 factors referring to task performance
1. Job-specific task proficiency
2. Non-job-specific task proficiency
3. Written and oral communication proficiency
4. Supervision—in the case of a supervisory or leadership position
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5. Management/administration
a. Planning and organizing
b. Guiding directing, and motivating subordinates + feedback
c. Training, coaching, and developing subordinates
d. Communicating effectively and keeping others informed
B) Contextual Performance
2 types of contextual performance
1. Stabilizing → smooth functioning of the organization
a. Organizational citizenship behavior with its 5 components altruism,
conscientiousness, civic virtue, courtesy, and sportsmanship
2. Proactive behaviors → aim at changing and improving work procedures and organizational
processes
a. Organizational spontaneity
b. Prosocial organizational behavior
c. Taking charge
C) RELATIONSHIP between Task and Contextual Performance
• Conceptually and empirically distinct
• Task performance and contextual performance factors (e.g. job dedication and interpersonal
facilitation) contribute uniquely to overall performance in managerial jobs
• Each is predicted by different variables
o Abilities and skill → task performance
o Personality related factors → contextual performance
▪ Ability and motivational factors → Personal initiative (aspect of contextual perf.)
Performance as a Dynamic Concept
• Individual performance varies over time
o Learning process and other long-term changes
▪ Learning process initially increases and then plateaus
▪ Early skill acquisition – controlled processing, declarative knowledge and
optimal allocation of attentional resources = Transition stage
▪ Later skill acquisition – automatic processing, procedural knowledge,
psychomotor abilities = Maintenance stage
o Temporary changes → psycho-physiological state
▪ Caused by: long working hours, disturbances of the circadian rhythm, or
exposure to stress
▪ May result in: fatigue or decrease in activity, however not necessarily
performance decrease (may switch to diff. strategies)
Perspectives on Performance
These are not mutually exclusive, but encompass a different angle
1. Individual differences → individual characteristics (e.g., general mental ability, personality) as
sources for variation in performance
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2. Situational perspective → which focuses on situational aspects as facilitators and impediments
for performance
3. Performance regulation perspective →
describes the performance process
Individual Differences Perspective
• Which individuals perform best?
• Hunter →bidirectional relationship between
job knowledge and ability
• Campbell (1990) general model →
performance components as a function of
three determinants:
1. Declarative knowledge (facts,
principles, goals and self),
2. Procedural knowledge and skills
(cognitive and psychomotor skills,
physical skill, self-management skill, and interpersonal skill)
3. Motivation (choice to perform, level of effort, and persistence of effort)
• Campbell neglects situational variables as predictors of performance
• Meta-analytic evidence → strong relationship between cognitive ability and job performance
• Meta-analyses → general relationships between personality factors and job performance are
relatively small; the strongest relationships emerged for neuroticism/emotional stability and
conscientiousness
• Individual differences in motivation may be caused by differences in motivational traits and
differences in motivational skills
• Self-efficacy → related both to task and contextual performance
o Mainly important in the learning process
• Professional experience shows a positive, although small relationship with job performance
• Emotional control
• Motivational control
• Implications on personnel selection → organizations need to select individuals on the basis of
their abilities, experiences, and personality + training programs
Situational Perspective
• In which situations do individuals perform best?
• Workplace factors
A. Enhance and facilitate performance
B. Impede performance
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A. Enhancing performance
• Job characteristics model (Hackman and
Oldham)
o Small, but positive relationship
between job characteristics and
job performance
• Sociotechnical systems theory (Trist &
Bamforth, 1951)
o work systems as composed of
social and technical subsystems
and suggests that performance
improvement can only follow from the joint optimization of both subsystems
o More concerned with group performance (than individual)
B. Impeding performance
• Within role theory (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964) → role ambiguity and role
conflict are conceptualized as stressors that impede performance
o Empirical support is weak
• Situational constraints → lack of necessary information, problems with machines and supplies
as well as stressors within the work environment
o Additional regulation capacity is needed to resolve a problem (e.g. broken down
machine which impedes performance), this leaves less capacity for the task
C. Overall
• The lack of positive features in the work situation such as control at work threatens
performance more than the presence of some stressors
• Individual performance can be improved by job design interventions (giving more control over
the process)
Performance Regulation Perspective
• How does the performance process look like?
• What is happening when someone is ‘performing’
• Most of these approaches focus on regulatory forces within the individual
• Investigates differences between high and moderate performers while working on a task
o High performers differ from moderate performers in the way they approach their tasks
and how they arrive at solutions
o High performers focus more on long-range goals and show more planning in complex
and ill-structured tasks, but not in well-structured tasks
• Action theory approach → describes the performance process— as any other action—from
both a process and a structural point of view
o Process point of view focuses on the sequential aspects of an action → goal
development, information search, planning, execution of the action and its monitoring
and feedback processing
o Structural point of view refers to its hierarchical organization → high goals, good mental
health, detailed planning, and good feedback processes
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• Goal setting theory → assumes that goals affect performance via four mediating mechanisms:
effort, persistence, direction, and task strategies
o One of the most powerful work-related intervention programs
o Improvement of the action process itself improves performance
• Feedback → enhances performance (best coupled with goal setting)
• Reinforcement theory → financial interventions, non-financial interventions such as
performance feedback, social rewards such as attention and recognition, or a combination of all
these types of reinforcements
o Positive effect on task performance
Relations Among the Various Perspectives
• Usually, research combines the different perspectives
• Individual differences + situational perspective → motivated behavior
• Helpful to develop a model which combines the individual differences and situational
perspective with the performance regulation perspective
Performance in a Changing World of Work
Continuous Learning
• Due to fast technological advancement → learning and competence development become
increasingly important
• New concept of ‘adaptive performance’ as a new performance concept in which ‘learning’
constitutes a major performance dimension
• In the past learning seen more as a prerequisite of performance
• Individuals will go back and forth between the skill acquisition and the maintenance phase
Proactivity
• Becoming increasingly important
• Performing well is no longer sufficient
• Personal initiative has been shown to be related to company performance, particularly in
entrepreneurial businesses
• Proactivity might become an important predictor of task performance
Working in Teams
• Organizations become more interested in team performance than in individual performance
• Which individual difference variables predict individual performance within a teamwork setting?
o task-related skills and knowledge are not sufficient
o interpersonal and self-management skills and knowledge are regarded to be essential
• Which aspects of individual performance are relevant for team performance?
o individual task performance is necessary for high team performance
o helping was positively related to both quantity and quality aspects of group
performance in a production setting
• How does individual performance translate into team performance?
o It is not just sum of individual performances
o There is a factor of the individuals being dependent on each other
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Globalization
• Production and services are produced for a global market, and they compete worldwide
• Workforces become increasingly global → culturally diverse
• Globally operating companies are faced with great challenges when trying to implement an
identical performance appraisal system worldwide → needs to be tailored to each culture
Technology
• Individual work behavior, thus performance, is very closely linked to the use of technology-
based systems
• It becomes very difficult to separate the technology’s and the individual’s contribution to
individual performance
A Theory of Individual Differences in Task and Contextual Performance
(Motowidlo, Borman and Schmit - 1997)
Aim: describes a theory of job performance that assumes that job performance is behavioral, episodic,
evaluative, and multidimensional
Job performance: aggregated value to the organization of the discrete behavioral episodes that an
individual performs over a standard interval of time
Introduction
• Selection research has paid more attention to predictors of performance than it has to the
performance construct itself
• This article incorporates both themes
o Dimensional structure of the performance domain
o Causal pattern of relations between antecedents of job performance and its various
dimensional components.
Basic Assumptions about Job Performance
Job performance is behavioral, episodic, evaluative, and multidimensional
Performance is a Behavioral Construct
• Behavior, performance, and results are not the same things
o Behavior – what people do while at work
o Performance – behavior with an evaluative component (positive/negative/effective)
o Results – states or conditions of people or things that are changed by performance and
consequently either contribute to or detract from organizational goal accomplishment
• Model should focus on behavior, not results because
o States or conditions of things or people that are changed by performance are also
affected by other extraneous factors not under the individual performer's control
o Behavioral focus is necessary to develop a psychological understanding of selection
processes
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Performance Behavior Is Episodic
• Episodes – occasions when people do something that does make a difference in relation to
organizational goals
• It is not a stream of 8 hours at work, but individual occasions
Performance Behavior Episodes Are Evaluative
• Only behavioral episodes that make a difference to organizational goal accomplishment are part
of the performance domain
• Behavioral episodes in the performance domain have varying contribution values for the
organization that range from slightly to extremely positive
• It is possible to identify behavioral episodes that are regarded as more or less organizationally
desirable even if the organizational goals aren’t explicitly stated
The Performance Domain Is Behaviorally Multidimensional
• The aggregated contribution value of an individual's behavioral episodes over a standard
interval of time represents the net worth of that individual's behavior to the organization during
that time interval = overall job performance
• Dilemma of aggregating several distinct dimensions
• Solution → organize the performance domain into behaviorally homogeneous categories and
aggregate contribution values of behavioral episodes separately in each category
Task Performance and Contextual Performance
• Task performance - a direct relation to the organization's technical core, either by executing its
technical processes or by maintaining and servicing its technical requirements
o Activities that transform raw materials into the goods and services that are the
organization's products (operating a production machine)
o Activities that service and maintain the technical core by replenishing its supply of raw
materials (distributing finished products)
• Contextual performance - does not contribute through the organization's core technical
processes but it does maintain the broader organizational, social, and psychological
environment in which the technical core must function
o Helping and cooperating with others
o Following organizational rules and procedures even when personally inconvenient
o Volunteering to carry out task activities that are not formally part of the job
