importance of job performance essay

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Essay: Employee Performance and Job Performance

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This chapter reviews the relevant prior literature pertaining to leadership, motivation, training, skill and knowledge that contribute to job performance amongst RMN personnel. The literature reviews are based on the jobs and organization which are related to the job performance in the RMN. The chapter ends with a summary.

2.2 Employee Performance

2.2.1 Job Performance

In this research, job performance is the dependent variable, which is the most frequently used variables in the organizational psychology. For many decades, the view focused on contributing factors that affected job performance has received much attention in the research. The general consensus from numerous studies was that employee performance is only mildly, but positively, linked to general measures of performance.

Sulaiman (2012) explained the six dimensions of job performance namely work duties, work skill, quality of work, work enthusiasm and innovative potential. Roa (2004) defined performance as the output delivered by an individual in relation to their given role during a particular period of a time under the set of circumstances operating at that point of time. An individual’s performance is a function of three sets of factors; the ability or competence to perform various tasks that lead to performance, motivation to carry on each of these tasks and work efforts to carry out. The performance can be measured firm the output and determinant factor on how well an individual has done a given role across the period time. Meanwhile, Dees (2009) in his study mentioned that job performance is the manner in which something fulfills its intended purpose.

The job performance of employees has metamorphosed into a topical issue in organizational management. This development could be attributed to the fact that organizational outcomes and successes are, to a large extent, determined by the performance of their human resources (Hedge, Borman & Lammelein 2006). At organizational level, the determining factors that are important in stimulating employee job performance are very crucial in that managers may be able to deal with policies and practices affecting employees more effectively and efficiently in the fast-paced workplace environment of today (Penny & Joanne 2013).

At both industry and national levels, the subject of job performance has significance to the economies of developing countries such as South Africa, whose productivity levels are partially determined by the aggregate job performance of individual employees in different industries throughout the entire country (Woratz 2012). This presents the need to develop an in-depth understanding of factors influencing job performance in organizations in the sense that, unless updated information on factors influencing job performance is known and understood, organizations will continue to be inundated with nagging employee performance problems that remain unresolved (Avalos 2007).

Motowidlo (2003) claimed that job performance is ‘the total expected value to the organization of discrete behavioral episodes that an individual carries out over a standard period of time’. Usually employees who are able to perform better (high performers) will have higher priority in being hired compared to those low performers. Highly performing employees are needed to attain organizational goals (high level of productivity) and to keep the company in achieving competitive advantages (Sonnentag and Frese, 2002).

Performance management, in study by Michael Armstrong (2005) was defined as a systematic management tool comprised of purposes, standards, objectives, feedback, reward and measurement that are agreed on to receive more effective results from the organizations, individuals and teams by motivating the individuals in a way to make them aware of their own potentials. Napoleon best sums it all when he said that, ‘the man who was armed with it, was worth three men who were not’ as stated in Eric (2011) study.

The theory of planned behavior Ajzen (2011) with its emphasis on the proximal antecedents of job effort and performance is offered as an alternative. According to the theory, intentions to exert effort and to attain certain performance level are determined by attitudes, subjective norms and perception of control in relation to these behavior; and these variables, in turn, are a function of readily accessible beliefs about the likely outcomes of effort and performance, about the normative expectations of important others, and about factors that facilitate or hinder effective performance.

Millet (2010) stated that an effective leader knows how to check, maintain and when necessary, improve staff morale. He listed that by monitoring staff morale, one will realize the ease in bringing in improvements when performance and efficiency begins to deteriorate.

In order to achieve high productivity in an organization, the organization firstly needs to discover methods that can be used to improve the employee’s performance. According to Pushpakumari (2008), a great effort is necessary for the employees to attain high performance in jobs. When the employees are satisfied with their jobs, they tend to be motivated and are willing to put more effort and committed more in their jobs.

Employee performance in the organization will be enhanced if they find that organization are more concerned to satisfy their employees as they perceived (Mohammad Rabiul Basher Rubel & Daisy Mui Hung Kee, 2014).

Organizational commitment will enhance the success of an organization by making employees dedicated to the achievement of its goals (Grawe et al., 2012). The success of any organization can be predicted by its success in raising and maintaining employees’ commitment. High levels of commitment contribute to positive attitudes and behaviors in organizations (Chughtai and Zafar, 2006; Sinclair et al., 2005; Srivastava, 2013).

Job performance also influenced by three principal factors (Farh, Seo & Tesluk 2012; Kacmar et al. 2009), namely: declarative knowledge (knowledge about facts, principles and objects), procedural knowledge and skill (ability to implement declarative knowledge), and motivation (choice to expend effort, level of effort and persistence).

Job performance has connections with a number of organizational outcomes that include customer service and product quality (Blignaut 2011), manager-employee relationships and employee turnover (Dalal & Hulin 2008).

Becker et al, (2011) stated that employee’s performance is measured against the performance standards set by the organization. Good performance means how well employees performed on the assigned tasks. In every organization there are some expectations from the employees with respect to their performance. When they perform up to the standards and meet organizational expectations they are believed to be good performers. From this literature, analysis can be made that job performance actually can be looked on various factors in investigating the element that affected job performance.

2.3 Factors Affecting Job Performance

2.3.1 Leadership

The definition of leadership used in the Malaysian Army Command, Leadership and Management Doctrine, (2007) is the art of influencing and directing people to achieve willingly the team or organizational goal.

Northouse’s (2001) defined leadership, ‘as a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal’ (Northouse, 2001, p.3). The definition supplies the key concepts of process, influence, groups and goals. Viewing leadership as a process suggests that leadership impacts leaders and followers in a situational environment, and is not adequately described as a characteristic or trait of the individual leader (Hughes, Ginnett & Curphy, 2006). The process is complex and multidimensional. It includes individuals, situations, groups, technical, function, emotions, feelings, relationships, internal environment and external environment just to name few. Influence involves how a leader affects followers; with or without influence, there is no leadership (Northouse, 2001)

The present study adds to the existing literature of finding the extent of relationship between leadership effectiveness and employee performance in the Indian context with the following objectives: To ascertain the various factors that affects the effectiveness of the existing leadership styles; To determine whether there is any difference in the leadership choice between public and private sector enterprises; To find out the relationship between effective leadership and employee performance as measured by extra effort, employee effectiveness, satisfaction and dependability.

Leaders take the necessary measures and establish human relationships to provide optimal use of human resources in their organization that we can refer to these measures take correct leadership style. Obviously, every leader in their organization uses a particular leadership style that is actually a set of his behavior patterns that frequently occurs during the constant organizational working and others know him by it and as the leader of the organization are in very close cooperation with the staff, the leadership style of these managers has a significant impact on staff morale. And consequently, the staff morale will have an effect on their performance (Shirzad & Kebriya & Zanganeh, 2011).

In fact, leadership is important for all organizations to achieve goals. Since leadership is a key factor for improving the performance of the organization, the success or failure of an organization depends on the effectiveness of leadership at all levels. Researchers have stated that leadership is an ability to influence attitudes, beliefs, and abilities of employees to achieve organizational goals. Over the years, leadership has been a major topic between the researchers but dramatic social changes that have occurred over the past two decades makes the issue of leadership and its relationship with other organizational factors more remarkable (Duckett & Macfarlane, 2003).

From the beginning of globalization, the primary challenge for a manager is to command different strategies to boost a firm’s performance (Habib, Khurram & Idress, 2010). Job satisfaction plays a vital role for the strength of an organization which has significant effect on employee performance. And the word performance we used to pass on the individual aptitude is to be inspired, stirring, pioneering and to be determined to achieve the goals of an organization (Walumbwa & Hartnell, 2011). Leadership is associated with employee performance (Ogbonna & Harris 2000). The relationship between leadership and performance has established a considerable attention (Gadot, 2006). The main theme of the every organization is to enhance employee performance.

According to Mehra et al. (2006), when some organizations seek efficient ways to enable them to outperform others, a longstanding approach is to focus on the effects of leadership. This is because team leaders are believed to play a pivotal role in shaping collective norms, helping teams cope with their environments, and coordinating collective action. This leader-centered perspective has provided valuable insights into the relationship between leadership and team performance. Therefore, summarizing past studies’ literature, there is a positive relationship between leadership and job performance.

2.3.2 Motivation

As performance of employees is significant for organizations, the management should consider improving performance of workers in their companies by encouraging them to do their tasks and duties as efficiently and effectively as possible. Therefore, motivation in firms is absolutely important and necessary because it could change the behavior of employees in positive ways. That is why many managers believe that when they establish motivated employees in the workplace, they can observe significant achievements in their organizations (Mohammad Saeid Aarabi, 2013)

Motivation is the most important matter for every organization, in the public or private sectors. For the success of any organization, motivation plays an important role. All organizations encountes the matter of motivation whether they are in the public or private sector (Chintallo & Mahadeo, 2013). According to Chaudhary & Sharma (2012), the word motivation is derived from ‘Motive’. The meaning of ‘motive’ is needs, wants, and the desire of the persons. Hence, ’employees motivation’ means the process in which an organization inspires its employees in the shape of rewards, bonus etc. for achieving the organization’s goals.

Today, there are many discussions about motivation and the relationship between employee’s efficiency and the organizational efficiencies. Motivation will lead to the fact that workers or employees of the organization will seriously do his duties and responsibilities (Azar and Shafighi, 2013).

Robbins (2001) defines motivation as the processes that account for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal. The three key elements in the definition are intensity, direction and persistence. Intensity is the concern with how hard a person tries. This is the element that most of us focus on when we talk about motivation. However, high intensity is unlikely to lead to favorable job performance outcome unless the effort is channeled in a direction that benefits the organization.

According to Iqbal et al. (2012), the purpose of employee’s motivation and their ability to collectively participate into employee’s performance and in their difficult tasks given by the manager are to achieve maximum productivity. This researcher is more concerned with increase in productivity, perfection and working ability. The needs and wants of employees having more important in research history. Motivation is the one of the most important term of psychology and most managers want maximum output and productivity. They tackle this with in a good manner and motivate their employee in a better way. Motivation also increases the cooperation between employees and managers, it also encourage their responsibilities. It also encourages participation of their subordinates, to take their responsibilities in better way and also to help oversee other employees and monitor their performance. Motivation gives managers a maximum rate of interaction towards work and allows them to know their employee’s working capacity and assign work according to their capacity to get maximum productivity (Ali, Abrar and Haider, 2012).

Therefore, we have to consider the quality of an effort as well as its intensity. Effort that is directed towards and consistent with the organization’s goal is the kind of effort that we should be seeking. Finally, motivation has a persistence dimension. This is a measure of how long a person can maintain effort. Motivated individuals stay with a task long enough to achieve their goal.

Motivation is a Latin word and it means ‘To move’ (Wade & Tavris, 2008). Psychologists believe that motivation is the process that drives individual towards achieving a goal. Moreover, motivation gives a person a purpose and the drive that he needs to achieve it. It helps people to push or pull from a bad situation, which are negative features in their lives. Nowadays, employers are interested to know about motivation and how to motivate their employees to improve productivity.

On the other hand, employees who feel motivated to work are likely to be persistent, creative and productive, turning out high quality work that they willingly undertake. Motivation can be defined as something inside people that drives them to action. Motivation is the willingness to work at a certain level of effort. Motivation emerges out of needs, values, goals, intentions and expectations (Josiah Roman Aketch, Odhiambo Odera, Paul Chepkuto & Ochieng Okaka, 2012).

Therefore, Maslow’s Motivation Theory is important as it assists the learner to acquire the behaviour necessary for effective performance. People learn if they accept the need for training and commit to it. If their motivation is weak, for instance if they doubt their ability to learn, no matter how well their training is designed and implemented, its effectiveness will be limited (Bruce,2003).

As supported by Armstrong (2001), the more highly motivated the trainee, the more quickly and thoroughly a new skill or knowledge is learned. This means training should be based on what the employee desires, such as job promotion and recognition to enhance performance. Maslow’s model has had a considerable impact on the study of motivation in general and in particular with regards to employee performance that relates to this research.

Contrary to Maslow’s views, the short answer appears to be the fact that for the majority of people, money is clearly significant and a motivator at work. But to what extent is money a significant motivator and how important depends upon their individual circumstances and the other happiness they derive from work. The bottom line is definitely the extent to which money motivates people to work to the top of their abilities. Even though pay may still make people tick, there are now a number of other significant influences on motivation. For a lot of people, the feeling of being recognized and valued appears more important than money in motivating them to keep on in a particular job. (Laurie 2007, 255) Therefore, motivation has been an issue of concern in the past and has established itself as an integral part in current organizational settings. Motivation is quite complex to comprehend thus placing awareness to the fact that several factors influence employees performance in a particular organization. Reason being that, what motivates one worker will not definitely motivate the other employee within the same company.

McShane et al defines motivation as ‘…a factor that exist in an individual which has the potential to affect the way, strength and eagerness of behaving towards work’. (McShane & Von Glinow 2003, 132) The above definition of motivation has been supported by Petri & Govern, ‘motivation is the thought that explains the propelling force in an individual that explains differences in intensity of behavior’. (Petri & Govern 2004, 16).

The employee motivation is obviously important. In fact, it is one of the most important and essential factors for the achievement of employees, and ultimately, the organizational targets and goals (Berman et al., 2010). Ololube (2006) asserts that motivation to work, whether intrinsic or extrinsic are very essential in the lives of workers because they form the fundamental reason for working in life. It represents the complex forces and needs which provide the energy for an individual to perform a particular task (Schulze & Steyn, 2003). Moreover, employee motivation serves as an essential component of business operations whereby high motivation coincides with job satisfaction, a sense of pride in one’s work, a lifelong commitment to organization which enhances performance and productivity (Linz et al., 2006). Likewise, for Islamic organizations, this factor is useful to examine the employees’ performance, although the findings may be equivocal.

Motivation increases the job involvement by making the work more meaningful and interesting as well as the fact that it keeps the employees more productive and improves their subsequent job performance (Kamery, 2004; Ekerman, 2006).

Further research needs to be carried out on a larger population and sample size to increase the generalizability of the findings. More motivation factors and other factors that could have influenced on job performance must be included in order to obtain more comprehensive understanding factors that influence on job performance (Mohammad Saeid Aarabi, Indra Devi Subramaniam & Abu Baker Almintisir Abu Baker Akeel, 2013). 2.3.3 Attitude

Bagozzi states that the term attitude is often used as an umbrella expression covering such concepts as preferences, feelings, emotions, beliefs, expectations, judgments, appraisals, values, principles, opinions, and intentions (Onzima, A. D., 2011). Attitude can be formed from a person’s past and present. In lay language, attitude may refer to the distinct concept of mood, or be especially synonymous with teenage rebellion.

An attitude is actually defined as ‘… a summary evaluation of an object or thought’ (Malhotra, N. K.,2005). The object or phenomenon can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind (Bohner, G., and Wanke, M., 2002) and may include people, products, and organizations.

Attitude plays an important role in generating a smooth assignment so that it can be executed efficiently and effectively with the consent of personal behavior. An organization is able to develop specific skills and training to its employees based on the needs and requirements of the organization. Particularly the military is in dire need of a positive thinking in all aspects of the assignment. Positive attitude in the nature of a person or the organization includes factors that will produce the best performance and achieve the standards set by the organization.

Sergio Roman (2005) stated that the level of education affects a person in performing a task. High level of education will encourage an attitude to do the job better, and more quality compared to workers with lower education. Attitude consists of the three main components, namely discerning awareness, influence and behavior. Cognitive category in attitude is a belief, opinion and knowledge or information about an individual. Influence on attitudes translates into behavior. Behavior on the part commission refers to a certain attitude towards something or someone. The three components of this attitude prove that attitude is something that is complex. It can be concluded that emotions and feelings affect an individual’s attitude towards something or someone.

The attitude-performance problem has drawn extensive research from all fields of behavioral sciences over the past 70 years (Luu, H.,2011). Arguments that support an attitude towards work cause performance usually refer to the functions of attitudes as guidelines and facilitators of behavior (e.g. Judge, T. A., Carl J. T., Joyce E. B., 2001) or refer to the functions of attitudes as the motivational effects of the personal importance or identification with the job or organization (e.g., as a component or a consequence of the commitment; see (Meyer, J. P., Becker, T. E., and Vandenberghe, C., 2004).

Attitude towards work is the feelings we have toward different aspects of the work environment (Carpeter et al, 2009). According to him, there are some elements which influence attitude towards work, namely personality, person-environment fit, job characteristics, psychological contract, organizational justice, work relationship and stress.

According to Sulaiman, et al (2013), given the facts about competency and attitude having equal effect on performance, competency is employee’s skills and knowledge, potential and attitude are internal feelings to perform tasks efficiently and quickly. Employees are the source of earnings for all services provider organizations and if they are committed to their work, they can provide services efficiently, where attitude and performance are correlated where a good behavior person can deal with customers perfectly and increase organization profit. Lee and Chen (2013) concluded that employees doing work for a long time in organizations have a negative attitude because the longer the time passed with the specific organization, their commitment to work is also lower and finding motivation is a solution for this type of situation.

(Judge et al. 2001) noted that ‘although most social psychologist would argue that attitudes do predict corresponding behaviors, industrial organizational psychologists continue to hold the view that the most focal behavior on the job (job performance)’.

Employee attitude is the most influencing factor that forms personality traits especially at workplace (Waryszak, R. and B. King, 2001). A leader can influence the attitude of his subordinates, psychologically influence them to erect high level of performance and enhance the satisfaction of employees (Burris, E.R., J.R. Detert and D.S. Chiaburu, 2008).

In the line with the previous opinion, (Wei, W. C., and Chu, S. H., 2008) performed a survey about the relationship between attitude towards work and job performance in the financial service industry and they found that work attitude has a positive effect on job performance. Better work attitude leads to better job performance. Studies on attitude mentioned above affirmed that attitude is about the conduct of life through knowledge which transferences to the performance of individual.

2.3.4 Skill

Skill is the learned capacity or ability to carry out the pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both. In other words, the abilities that one possesses. Skill can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self-motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be useful only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environment stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used. People need a broad range of skills in order to contribute to the modern economy.

Dokko, Wilk and Rothbard (2008) proposed a psychological theory to propose socio cognitive factors that interfere with the transfer of knowledge and skill acquired from prior work experience. The finding showed that task-relevant knowledge and skill mediates the relationship between prior related experience and job performance. The study also suggests that the positive effect of prior related experience on task relevant knowledge and skill is attenuated by higher levels of experience within the current firm.

Benjamin (2012) asserts that providing employees with an opportunity to take on a variety of skills of greater complexity in their current roles enables an employee to learn new tasks in a supported environment and develop the skills needed to progress in his career. Management can also assess the employee’s performance and see how he responds to feedback on the new responsibilities, thus enabling company executives to devise a job design that is workable and effective.

In the view of Garg & Rastogi (2006), skill variety refers to the extent to which the job requires the employee to draw from a number of different skills and abilities as well as upon a range of knowledge (cited in Ali, 2010). According to Benjamin (2012), the theory behind providing skill variety in job design is that it will reduce boredom, thereby increasing job satisfaction and motivation. This is likely to be true as long as the employee enjoys the skills and perceives the addition and mix of skills to be a benefit to the job. But adding a variety of skills which the employee finds stressful, isn’t qualified to address, or simply adding basic duties and minimal skills without adding to the intrinsic value of the job could actually have the opposite effect and increase dissatisfaction.

This finding empirically confirms the theoretical arguments given by Al-Ahmadi (2009), Ivancevich (1998), (Kahya, 2007), Garg & Rastogi (2006), Aswathappa (2006), Mathis and Jackson (2003), Campion et al (2005), and Perry et al., (2006). They explained that strong, positive relationship exist between the extent of a firm’s adoption of high involvement HRM strategies including skill variety and job performance. The implication of the finding is that, hospitals should provide nurses with more training to enhance their skills in order to improve nurse’s job performance

Arnold (2007) defined employability skills as the ability to survive in a job. Kearns (2001) has listed employability skills as i) the availability of work and individual works capacity, ii) knowledge in entrepreneurships, iii) the creative and innovative, interpersonal skills and iv) thinking and willingness to learn.

Effective trainings convey relevant and useful information that inform employees and develop skills and behaviors that can be transferred back to the workplace. (Montana & Charnov, 2000). The goal of training is to create an impact that lasts beyond the end time of the training itself. The focus is on creating specific action steps and commitments that focus people’s attention on incorporating their new skills and ideas back at work. Training can be offered as skill development for individuals and groups. In general, trainings involve presentation and learning of content as a means for enhancing skill development and improving workplace behaviors (Karlan & Valdivia, 2011)

These two processes, training and development are often closely connected. Training can be used as a proactive means for developing skills and expertise to prevent problems from arising and can be an effective tool in addressing any skills or performance gaps among staff.

In a similar approach, Sultana et al (2012) found training and development significant for the employee performance and they suggested that the organization must increase their investment in training and development to increase the performance of employees as well as their skills and capabilities.

Azami Zaharim (2009) stated that employability skills are skills that are very influential in ensuring the success and progress of a company or industry. Affandi (2012) identifies that employees or graduates having employability skills are able to perform in various situations. In this regard, the military organization with its trained personnel who work in technical working environment should be capable of maintaining their own skills or among their peers so that it will meet the needs of the organizations.

All the studies found that the higher average levels of labor productivity in firms in continental Europe were closely related to the greater skills and knowledge of their workforces, especially intermediate skills. Skill levels were also shown to be associated with the uptake of new equipment and to maintenance activity. These studies mostly took place in the mid to late 80s and early 90s but the findings have been replicated very recently (Mason and Wagner, 2002) with similar results.

Leithch (2006) acclaimed that investing in the literacy and numeracy skills on young people will improve their chances of employability; enhance productivity at company level, and competitiveness internationally. However, while literacy and numeracy skills are necessary, they are by no means sufficient. Furthermore, Leithch continued by examining qualifications and those things that can be measured. However, skills are arguably more broad-based.

A recent study published by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) (Purcell et al. 2003) also finds these positive impacts and examines the ways in which HR practices may impact on performance and asserts that for people to perform above minimal requirements they must: i)have the ability, ie the requisite knowledge and skills; ii) be motivated to work well and iii) be given the opportunity to deploy their skills and contribute.

While study by Minbaeva (2005) stated that skill is the process of developing talents in order to more effectively perform a specific job or task.

2.3.5 Knowledge

Knowledge refers to the information possessed and their ability to assimilate additional information. Relating to the current information, the RMN requires the Navy People to have skills of specific job tasks and a strong basis in general education. Relating to new information, the RMN desires the Navy People that are life-long learners and are easily trainable, meaning that they have the ability to receive instruction and new information.

Knowledge is familiarity with someone or something, which can include facts, information, descriptions or skills acquired through experience or education. It can be implicit (as with practical skill or expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); it can be more or less formal or systematic. In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called epistemology; the philosopher Plato famously defined knowledge as ‘justified true belief’. However, no single agreed upon definition of knowledge exists, though there are numerous theories to explain it. Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: communication, association, perception and reasoning; while knowledge is also said to be related to the capacity of acknowledge in human beings.

Knowledge workers are becoming an increasingly important and voluminous group of employees, covering a quarter to a half of workers in advanced economies (e.g., Davenport, 2006; Levenson, 2012).

Knowledge characteristics reflect the kinds of knowledge, skill, and ability demands that are placed on an individual as a function of what is done on the job (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006). Recent dissemination of service work and overflow of knowledge workers have particularly emphasized the importance of cognitive ability for handling working issues. As organizations increasingly struggle with complexity and tend to build their future on the knowledge work, they should be able to recognize, understand and design jobs that will utilize competencies of their workers. The most prominent knowledge characteristics are: job complexity, information processing, problem solving, skill variety, and specialization.

Judge (2004) revealed that high-ability teams perform better than lower-ability teams, especially when the workload is high. High-ability teams are also more flexible when it comes to changing situation as they were able to more effectively adapt prior knowledge to suit a set of new problems. The failures of the employees to perform their job effectively will certainly jeopardize the overall performance of an organization, thus cause lower productivity as mentioned by Abu AlRub (2004).

Likewise, Almeida et al (2003) examining the relationship between experience and performance frequently treat work experience as a substitute of knowledge. Knowledge characteristics are the structural features of jobs that affect the development and utilization of information and skills (Parker et al., 2001). If they are enriched, they can create challenging jobs and provide workers with opportunities to solve problems, process complex information, and to apply deep and broad skills (e.g., Morgeson & Campion, 2002; Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006). Their recent development reflects the wide increase of knowledge work and knowledge workers in modern business (Huang, 2011). Demanding and complex work settings for knowledge workers should positively influence on their task and contextual performance.

Jasvinder, Anwar and Ruslan (2001) stated that knowledge can be obtained through one’s own effort and can also be achieved through training, work and courses and through the positions he held throughout his career. Blasko (2009) explained on the importance of education and the inculcation of a higher level of knowledge to ensure that changes to the structure within the organization and development of military doctrine. Blasko said in his study of the Chinese Army on People Liberation Army (PLA) education reform organization, a lot of PLA institutions and training centers were combined and courses for its members have been modified according to the needs through the development of weapons systems and the concept of a combination of the three services. Even PLA officers are encouraged to furthering their studies in more than 50 PLA schools, locally and abroad.

Schack (2004) proved that the expert knowledge can be measured and it contributes in optimizing human performance. The study found that a person with expertise in a particular field to perform all tasks needed excel in their field and those who do not have any expertise failed to shine in the performance of his duties in any field whatsoever. Knowledge can increase a person’s level of aspiration. It can also be a motivating factor to a person to take necessary measures to achieve the aspects of higher knowledge. When a level of knowledge is as what as expected, an individual in his career, will directly help him to perform his job effectively.

Study from the above mentioned scholars can be interpreted that knowledge is one of the main factors that should be considered in measuring performance.

2.4 Performance Theory and Model

Organizations need highly performing individuals in order to meet their goals, to deliver the services they specialized in, and finally to achieve competitive advantage. Performance is also important for the individual. Accomplishing tasks and performing at a high level can be a source of effectiveness, with feelings of mastery and pride. Low performance and not achieving the goals might be experienced as dissatisfying or even as a personal failure. Moreover, performance, if it is recognized by others within the organization, is often rewarded by financial and other benefits. Performance is a major, although not the only, prerequisite for future career development and success in the labor market. Although there might be exceptions, high performers get promoted more easily within an organization and generally have better career opportunities than low performers (VanScotter, Motowidlo, & Cross, 2000).

Flexible work options traditionally have been introduced largely to meet employer needs for flexibility or to keep costs down, although they may also have met employee needs and demands (Krausz et al., 2000). Most importantly, there is virtually no research finding that employees working on flexi-time have lower productivity than those on traditional fixed work schedules (Yang and Zheng, 2011).

Moreover, Christen et al. (2006) argued that employees’ effort and ability determined the level of job performance. They also claim a different concept of effort and performance, which is an input to work while job performance is an output from those efforts. Generally, job performance is related to the employees’ ability to carry out their job well or not.

This evidence suggests the long-standing idea that there are leaders and followers in teams. The leaders make decisions and the followers abide by them. While agreeableness was positively correlated with working with a team, it is negatively correlated with being a leader. Those followers who don’t always agree and are willing to voice their own opinions end up moving up the ranks while those who blindly agree are left as followers.

The strongest force behind the spread of more decent working time arrangements, one that is both productive and socially healthy, remains a full employment economy plus the new institutional structures that facilitate a formal expression for desired flexibility in working time options. Therefore, companies could and should be offered incentives to adopt and spread flexible working time arrangements, such as flexi-time and working time accounts, which are known to improve employee morale and attitudes. This could, in turn, not only enhance individual work performance, but also improve company productivity, quality and, ultimately, the sustainability of firm performance (Lonnie Golden, 2011).

New perspective on performance also provides hints as to how to start developing models which contain cross-level linkages from individual to group to organizational performance. Most of the research on performance within organizations conducted to date has used highly specific measures when examining individual performance (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000).

Reinforcement theory is an instrument used by managers to increase or decrease employees’ behaviors. As performance and effectiveness are more emphasized nowadays, it is important to understand and utilize these concepts in motivating staffs. Positive reinforcement is seen to be the most effective way of motivating staffs to perform better in organizations (Leong Teen Wei, Rashad Yazdanifard, 2014)

Traditional research finds the structural factors, e.g., composition, leadership structure, and board size, to be the most relevant influences on board effectiveness. Alternatively, behavioral approaches emphasize as the key factors of board effectiveness those influencing the processes within boards, i.e., effort norms, cognitive conflict, and usage of knowledge, as well as board members’ characteristics, including background diversity and behavioral characteristics. Factor analysis indicates that a new integrative framework for board effectiveness evaluation is much needed as a good starting point model for further empirical research. It is also suggested that the proper model implementation is contingent on its adjustment to the given socio-economic circumstances (Verica M. Babi”, Jelena D. Nikoli” & Jelena M. Eri”, 2011)

The method an organization chooses for performance reviews and evaluations can have the biggest effect on employee performance. Organizations that fail to review their employee’s performance or recognize a job well done may soon find disgruntled employees. Furthermore, organizations that stringently monitor employee work without providing employees the opportunity to provide feedback may also result in non-motivated employees (Cardy & Selvarajan, 2004).

The idea implies the dual role of the theory first to organizations and second to employees on the basis that both the organization and the employees must decide on the performance of their organization, and that when employees put in their best in the service of the organization, the culture and human resource practice should also ensure that the employees’ level of needs are reflected in the values the organization holds with high esteem (Greenberg & Baron, 2003).

Employee’s performance is an issue that has received wide attention in literature and research due to its importance since every organization aims to achieve higher performance (Ojo, 2009). For clarity, the two concepts, employees and performance, will be defined separately as follows to ensure common understanding. (a) Employees are people who are hired, working on the basis of part time or full time under an employment arrangement, whether it is in written or oral expression. It also includes agreement on the remuneration and the kind of duties expected of the employee within a time frame (Shumen, 2009). (b) Performance is the achievement of a set of assigned tasks that are anchored to time, with a result indicator that will measure the accomplishment level of the task assigned, which can be measured only when a performance standard has been put in place (Shumen, 2009).

Performances are activities that ensure goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner (Cardy & Selvarajan, 2004; McNamara 2005). Employee’s performance refers to the observable behaviors and actions which explain how a job is done, plus the results that are expected for satisfactory job performance (McNamara, 2005). To achieve or encourage higher performance from employees, the following criteria should be considered (Cardy & Selvarajan, 2004).

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How to Conduct a Great Performance Review

• Frank V. Cespedes

What to do before, during, and after the meeting.

The purpose of performance reviews is two-fold: an accurate and actionable evaluation of performance, and then development of that person’s skills in line with job tasks. For recipients, feedback has intrinsic and extrinsic value. Across fields, research shows that people become high performers by identifying specific areas where they need to improve and then practicing those skills with performance feedback.

Dissatisfaction with performance appraisals is pervasive. They are seen as time-consuming, demotivating, inaccurate, biased, and unfair. A McKinsey survey indicates most CEOs don’t find the appraisal process in their companies helps to identify top performers, while over half of employees think their managers don’t get the performance review right. A Gallup study is more negative: Just one in five employees agreed that their company’s performance practices motivated them.

• Frank V. Cespedes is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the author of Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

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Job performance: Why task and contextual performance matter from an Evidence-based Management perspective

• All Management Learning Resources
• Job performance

• Executive summary

Job performance (sometimes also called work performance) is a widely used tool and metric in management, however organizations rarely address what it really is, which dimensions it includes, and in which areas of work it becomes important. This CQ Dossier describes the two major components of job performance - task and contextual performance - and their relevance to the workplace in various spheres. We discuss the available evidence of how organizations who incorporate contextual performance into hiring, appraisal and training can gain a competitive advantage and provide information on how the two components of job performance interplay in practice.

Job performance is an important building block in management

Job performance consists of task performance and contextual performance, contextual performance: the ability of employees to contribute to the overall well-being of the organization, the benefits of contextual performance: improved organizational culture and climate, contextual performance is linked to organizational performance, personality and contextual performance: selecting the right employees, human resource practices: contextual performance plays a role in selection, assessment and performance appraisal, job analysis often includes important task and contextual behavior, leadership development: contextual performance can be covered in management training initiatives , key take-aways, references and further reading.

One of the main objectives of any working professional, whether it be a manager or an employee, is to deliver high performance on the job and to support your fellow peers, teams and coworkers to do the same. Consequently, the concept of job performance (sometimes also called work performance) is an important building block in management. However, even though the term job performance is a widely used tool in management, organizations rarely address what it really is, which dimensions it includes, and in which areas of organizational practice it becomes important. 

On a general level, job performance describes the contribution of an individual to the overall success of an organization. On a more specific and measurable level, job performance can be broken down into different factors. Depending on the framework you use, the factors vary (Koopmans et al. 2011). However, there is a broad consensus in the scientific community that job performance consists of two interplaying components.

According to Borman & Motowidlo (1993), job performance consists of two main factors:

• Task performance describes the core job responsibilities of an employee. It is also called "in-role prescribed behavior" (Koopmans et al. 2011) and is reflected in specific work outcomes and deliverables as well as their quality and quantity.
• Contextual performance goes beyond formal job responsiblities. Also referred to as "discretionary extra-role behavior" (Koopmans et al. 2011) contextual performance is reflected in activities such as coaching coworkers, strengthening social networks within an organization and going the extra mile for the organization.

One of the most important functions of an organization is to ensure that employees are effective in performing their jobs. However, in recent years, contextual performance is viewed as an integral part of overall job performance. Now practitioners and researchers view job performance as moving beyond what is considered effective for performance on a task. In the VUCA world, with changes in the global market and increased competition, employees are now expected to go beyond what is expected in their job description.

Contextual performance captures this ability of employees to engage in activities that contribute to the overall well-being of the organization. This aspect of job performance is viewed as equally important as task performance. Examples of contextual performance include volunteering for additional work, being a good organizational citizen, cooperating with coworkers and additional discretionary behaviors (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993).

Researchers and practitioners agree that job performance is multidimensional and consists of two main factors: task performance and contextual performance (Motowidlo & Schmit, 1999). Task performance is important because it relates to producing job-specific goods and services and requires employees to acquire and demonstrate core technical skills.

Although task performance is necessary, contextual performance boosts the organizational climate through strengthening social networks. When employees engage in contextual performance this contributes to the culture and climate of the organization. Contextual performance has the ability to transform the organization because employees volunteer for extra work, persist with enthusiasm and help and cooperate with others (Motowidlo & Schmit, 1999).

One of the main reasons to also include contextual performance as a measure of job performance is that it impacts the quality of human resource practices (Befort & Hattrup, 2003). Job performance is intrinsically linked to the goals and mission of the organization (Motowidlo & Schmit, 1999). Consequently, decisions concerning how to measure job performance and the relative weight assigned to task vs. contextual behaviors has important implications for decisions made regarding human resource practices (Befort & Hattrup, 2003).

There is research to suggest that personality traits are more effective predictors of contextual performance rather than predictors of task performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1997). Borman and colleagues demonstrated that the personality traits of conscientiousness and dependability correlate more highly with organizational citizenship behaviors than with task performance (Borman, Penner, Allen & Motowidlo, 2001). In comparison,  general cognitive ability  is more related to task performance (Arvey & Murphy, 1998).

There is also research showing that when organizations use job analysis, personality traits predict both task and contextual job performance (Jenkins & Griffith, 2004). One suggestion is to use narrow traits to predict contextual job performance rather than a reliance on global traits such as the Big Five personality factors (Jenkins & Griffith, 2004).

How and where does contextual performance matter in an organization?

Having introduced the concept of job performance and its two sub-dimensions, task performance and contextual performance, the questions arises how organizations can, should, and often already do make use of these two concepts.By understanding the interplay of these two dimensions, it becomes easier to understand how organizational practices work and how one's own behavior within it is crucial.

The importance of including contextual performance in human resource practices such as selection and assessment was demonstrated in a study by Murphy and Shiarella (1997). They demonstrated that the validity of selection procedures depended on the relative values placed on task and contextual performance. Including contextual performance in decision-making is also important for performance appraisal, which is an important human resource practice.

Managerial decision-making plays an important role in the performance appraisal function. Research has shown that supervisors differ in the relative weight they provide for the dimensions of task and contextual performance when deciding the overall contribution of the employee to the organization (Rotundo & Sackett, 2002). When managers place relative values on task and contextual performance behaviors this impacts decisions about promotions and other rewards.

Inclusion of contextual performance in assessment decisions can also impact the fairness of human resource practices. Research has shown that the relative importance that an organization places on task and contextual performance can influence adverse impact and the hiring of minorities (Hattrup, Rock & Scalia, 1997).

It is important for organizations to conduct a thorough job or organizational analysis to include important task and contextual behaviors that are job-relevant. One popular job analysis method, such as the Position Analysis Questionnaire, involves collecting ratings of the importance of job-relevant behaviors (McCormick, Jeannerette & Mecham, 1972).

Inclusion of these types of ratings has the potential to communicate those job-relevant behaviors that are valued within the organization. They impact hiring decisions and send a message on which behaviors are relevant to the organization in terms of daily behavior, behaviors that need to be trained, and behaviors that are rewarded through promotion or pay.

Research has shown that more experienced managers value contextual performance to a greater degree than less experienced managers (Befort, & Hattrup, 2003). Over time, managers gain a better appreciation of how task performance is related to the overall organizational context. Managers can learn to focus more on behaviors that are contribute to social connectedness and promote a positive work climate (Befort & Hattrup, 2003).

Organizations can implement management training initiatives that encourage less experienced managers to gain knowledge of how task and contextual performance are linked to the mission of the organization. These gains in knowledge can impact performance management measures such as appraisal ratings and managerial decision-making. 

In conclusion, this  CQ Dossier presents an argument for including both task and contextual performance for selection, performance management and training of employees. Inclusion of contextual performance provides organizations with a sustained competitive advantage because it is linked to the overall mission of the organization.

• Job performance is a building block in management but is not clearly defined in many organizations
• Job performance consists of the two main factors task performance and contextual performance
• Task performance is reflected in specific work outcomes and deliverables as well as their quality and quantity
• Contextual performance occurs when employees go beyond what is expected
• Contextual performance contributes to the overall well-being of the organization
• Personality traits are related to contextual performance and can be used in hiring decision
• Experienced managers pay more attention to contextual performance than inexperienced managers
• Organizations can include contextual performance in job analysis efforts

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Arvey, R. D., & Murphy K.R. (1998). Performance evaluations in work settings. Annual Review of Psychology , 49, 141-168.

Befort, N. and Hattrup, K. (2003) Valuing Task and Contextual Performance: Experience, Job Roles, and Ratings of the Importance of Job Behaviors.  Applied HRM Research , 8, 17-32.

Borman, W. C., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to include elements of contextual performance. In N. Schmitt & W. C. Borman (Eds.), Personnel selection in organizations (pp. 71-98). San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.

Borman, W. C., Penner, L. A., Allen, T. D., & Motowidlo, S. J. (2001). Personality predictors of citizenship performance. International Journal of Selection and Assessmen t, 9, (1-2), 52-69.

Cichy, Ronald F.; Cha, JaeMin; Kim, SeungHyun (2009): The relationship between organizational commitment and contextual performance among private club leaders. In:  International Journal of Hospitality Management  28 (1), S. 53–62.

Hattrup, K., Rock, J., & Scalia, C. (1997). The effects of varying conceptualizations of job performance on adverse impact, minority hiring, and predicted performance. Journal of Applied Psychology , 82, 656-664.

Koopmans, Linda; Bernaards, Claire M.; Hildebrandt, Vincent H.; Schaufeli, Wilmar B.; Vet Henrica, C. W. de; van der Beek, Allard J. (2011): Conceptual frameworks of individual work performance. A systematic review. In:  Journal of occupational and environmental medicine  53 (8), S. 856–866.

McCormick, E. J., Jeanneret, P. R., & Mecham, R. C. (1972). A study of job characteristics and job dimensions based on the Position Analysis Questionnaire. Journal of Applied Psychology , 56, 347-368.

Motowidlo, S. J., & Schmit, M. J. (1999). Performance assessment in unique jobs. In D. R. Ilgen & E. D. Pulakos (Eds.), The changing nature of performance (pp. 56-86). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Murphy, K. R., & Shiarella, A. H. (1997). Implications of the multidimensional nature of job performance for the validity of selection tests: Multivariate frameworks for studying test validity. Personnel Psychology , 50, 823- 854.

Rotundo, M., & Sackett, P. R. (2002). The relative importance of task, citizenship, and counterproductive performance to global ratings of job performance: A policy capturing approach. Journal of Applied Psychology , 87, 66-80.

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Performance management: Why keeping score is so important, and so hard

Effective performance management is essential to businesses. Through both formal and informal processes, it helps them align their employees, resources, and systems to meet their strategic objectives. It works as a dashboard too, providing an early warning of potential problems and allowing managers to know when they must make adjustments to keep a business on track.

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Organizations that get performance management right become formidable competitive machines. Much of GE’s successful transformation under former CEO Jack Welch, for instance, was attributed to his ability to get the company’s 250,000 or so employees “pulling in the same direction”—and pulling to the best of their individual abilities. As Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

Yet in too many companies, the performance-management system is slow, wobbly, or downright broken. At best, these organizations aren’t operating as efficiently or effectively as they could. At worst, changes in technologies, markets, or competitive environments can leave them unable to respond.

Strong performance management rests on the simple principle that “what gets measured gets done.” In an ideal system, a business creates a cascade of metrics and targets, from its top-level strategic objectives down to the daily activities of its frontline employees. Managers continually monitor those metrics and regularly engage with their teams to discuss progress in meeting the targets. Good performance is rewarded; underperformance triggers action to address the problem.

Where do things go wrong?

In the real world, the details of performancemanagement systems are difficult to get right. Let’s look at a few common pitfalls.

Poor metrics

The metrics that a company chooses must actually promote the performance it wants. Usually, it can achieve this only by incorporating several of them into a balanced scorecard. Problems arise when that doesn’t happen. Some manufacturing plants, for example, still set overall production targets for each shift individually. Since each shift’s incentives are based only on its own performance, not on the performance of all shifts for the entire day, workers have every incentive to decide whether they can complete a full “unit” of work during their shift.

If they think they can, they start and complete a unit. But if they don’t, they may slow down or stop altogether toward the end of the shift because otherwise all of the credit for finishing their uncompleted work would go to the following shift. Each shift therefore starts with little or no work in process, which cuts both productivity and output. A better approach would combine targets for individual teams with the plant’s overall output, so workers benefit from doing what they can to support the next shift as well as their own.

Poor targets

Selecting the right targets is both science and art. If they are too easy, they won’t improve performance. If they are out of reach, staff won’t even try to hit them. The best targets are attainable, but with a healthy element of stretch required.

To set such targets, companies must often overcome cultural barriers. In some Asian organizations, for example, missing targets is considered deeply embarrassing, so managers tend to set them too low. In the United States, by contrast, setting a target lower than one achieved in a previous period is often deemed unacceptable, even if there are valid reasons for the change.

Lack of transparency

Employees have to believe their targets encourage meaningful achievement. Frequently, however, the link between individual effort and company objectives is obscure or gets diluted as metrics and targets cascade through the organization. Different levels of management, in an attempt to boost their own standing or ensure against underperformance elsewhere, may insert buffers into targets. Metrics at one level may have no logical link to those further up the cascade.

In the best performance-management systems, the entire organization operates from a single, verified version of the truth, and all employees understand both the organization’s overall performance and how they contributed to it. At the end of every shift at one company in the automotive sector, all employees pass the daily production board, where they can see their department’s results and the impact on the plant’s performance. The company has linked the top-line financial metrics that shareholders and the board of directors care about to the production metrics that matter on the ground. Frontline employees can see the “thread” that connects their daily performance with the performance of their plant or business unit (Exhibit 1).

A senior leader at another manufacturer aligns the whole organization around a shared vision through quarterly town-hall meetings for more than 5,000 staff. Managers not only share the company’s financial performance and plant-specific results but also introduce new employees, celebrate work anniversaries, and recognize successful teams. Most important, if targets are missed, the senior leader acts as a role model by taking responsibility.

Lack of relevance

The right set of metrics for any part of a business depends on a host of factors, including the size and location of an organization, the scope of its activities, the growth characteristics of its sector, and whether it is a start-up or mature. To accommodate those differences, companies must think both top-down and bottom-up. One option is the hoshin-kanri (or policy-deployment) approach: all employees determine the metrics and targets for their own parts of the organization. Employees who set their own goals tend to have a greater sense of ownership for and commitment to achieving them than do those whose goals are simply imposed from above.

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Lack of dialogue.

Performance management doesn’t work without frequent, honest, open, and effective communication. Metrics aren’t a passive measure of progress but an active part of an organization’s everyday management. Daily shift huddles, toolbox talks, after-action reviews, and the like all help to engage team members and to maintain a focus on doing what matters most. Applying the “plan–do–check–act” feedback loop, based on pioneering research from Charles Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming, helps teams learn from their mistakes and identify good ideas that can be applied elsewhere. And in many high-performing companies, supervisors act as coaches and mentors. One-on-one sessions for employees demonstrate concern and reinforce good habits at every stage of career development.

Lack of consequences

Performance must have consequences. While the majority of employees will never face the relentless “win or leave” pressure typical of professional sports, weak accountability tells people that just showing up is acceptable.

Rewarding good performance is probably even more important than penalizing bad performance. Most companies have various kinds of formal and informal recognition-and-reward systems, but few do enough of this kind of morale building, either in volume or frequency. In venues from lunchroom celebrations to town-hall announcements, employee-of-the-month and team-achievement awards are invaluable to encourage behavior that improves performance and keeps it high. One COO at an industrial-goods company keeps a standing agenda item in the monthly business review for recognizing the performance of individuals and teams. Employees on the list may find a gift waiting at home to thank them (and their families) for a job well done.

Lack of management engagement

The words of Toyota honorary chairman Fujio Cho—“Go and see, ask why, show respect”—are now famous as basic lean-production principles. Yet in many companies, senior managers rarely visit plants except during periodic business reviews, and they appear on the shop floor only when a major new capital improvement is to be inspected.

Management interactions with frontline personnel are an extremely powerful performance-management tool. They send a message that employees are respected as experts in their part of the business, give managers an opportunity to act as role models, and can be a quick way to solve problems and identify improvements.

One company’s machinery shop, for example, had developed such a reputation for sloppiness and missed deadlines that managers suggested outsourcing much of its work. When a senior manager was persuaded to visit the workshop, he was appalled at the dirty, cluttered, and poorly maintained environment. Employees reported chronic underfunding for replacement parts and tools, and asked the manager what it would take to save their jobs. He told them to “clean up the shop and give me a list of what needs to be fixed.” Both sides lived up to their commitments, and in less than a year the shop became a reference case for efficiency within the company.

Building a strong performance-management system

The best companies build performance-management systems that actively help them avoid these pitfalls. Such systems share a number of characteristics.

Metrics: Emphasizing leading indicators

Too often, companies measure and manage performance through lagging indicators, such as compliance with monthly output or quality targets. By the time the results are known, it is too late to influence the consequences. The best companies track the same metrics—but also integrate their performance-management systems into critical process inputs. Industrial Internet technologies, such as the SCADA 1 1. Supervisory control and data acquisition. architecture and distributed-control systems, let manufacturing staff know within minutes (or seconds) about variations in performance, even in remote parts of a plant. That lets people react long before the variation undercuts output or quality.

Some changes require almost no investment in technology. At the end of each workday, for example, production and functional teams can complete a checkout form assessing how it went. A combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics and simple graphics (such as traffic lights and smiley faces) provides an easy, highly effective tool for identifying and correcting issues or problems before the next day’s work begins.

As performance-management systems evolve, the metrics they use will become more complex, incorporating continuous rather than discrete variables: “everyone showed up on time today” will become “the team achieved 93 percent on the schedule-performance index using 90 percent of the labor-performance index.” The extra detail better informs decisions such as whether to add more labor to meet a delivery date or to push out a schedule for delivery.

Sustainability: Standard work and a regular heartbeat

Regardless of changes to metrics and targets, the best companies keep the cadence of meetings and reviews constant, so they become an intrinsic part of the rhythm of everyday operations (Exhibit 2).

The emphasis on regular, standardized processes goes beyond explicit performance-management activities and extends deep into every aspect of a company’s operating models. Standard work, for example, is based on three simple rules. First, there should be a standard for all activities. Second, everyone must have the knowledge and ability to meet that standard. Finally, compliance with it must be monitored and measured.

In many functions, the business cycle forces a regular rhythm or cadence: the weekly payroll, the monthly accounting close, or the quarterly inventory review. Good companies take advantage of these requirements to define a few central metrics, such as cycle times and accuracy, thus driving continuous improvement across every function.

As part of a lean-manufacturing excellence program, one industrial-commodities company encourages employees to indicate “what went well today, what didn’t go well today, what management can do to help” on their productionarea boards every day. Supervisors collect the information on index cards and post them on a lean-idea board. Representatives of each function meet with the plant manager every morning and accept or reject the cards or return them for more information. Every accepted card gets an owner and timeline for completion. Company leaders estimate that the boards generate at least $2 million a year in cost savings or higher output—but the impact on employee morale and engagement is “priceless.”

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A checklist or standard operating procedure that defines the steps and sequences for every key process usually enforces standard work. In employee onboarding, for example, one company noted that small details—assigning email addresses, telephone numbers, and software and hardware access—were especially important for retaining employees early in their tenures. A checklist is now at the front of each new hire’s personnel file, with a copy in the supervisor’s file. The performance reviews of supervisors now assess how well they handled the onboarding of new employees, and everyone who resigns completes a mandatory exit interview.

Continuous improvement: Standard work is for leaders too

Standard work is essential at all levels of an organization, including the C-suite and senior management in general. Standard work for leaders forces a routine that, while uncomfortable at first, develops expectations throughout an organization. It is those expectations, along with specific metrics, that ultimately drive predictable, sustainable performance.

One global resources company now requires managers to demonstrate that they spend 50 percent of their time on a combination of coaching their people and attending safety briefings, shift huddles, improvement reviews, and production meetings. To free up time, other meetings are scheduled only on one day a week— and conference rooms no longer have chairs.

Taking this approach even further, every autumn a field-services organization commits itself to a comprehensive, enterprise-wide calendar for the entire following year. The calendar sets dates for all conferences, monthly and quarterly management meetings, formal performance reviews, and succession-plan meetings, as well as training and development opportunities. All agendas are fixed, and all meetings are subject to strict time limits. There is little need for additional leeway because internal reporting follows tight guidelines for transparency and timeliness: financial results are published internally every month, while data on the performance of teams and units in meeting annual incentive-plan goals are updated and published monthly on bulletin boards.

Most industrial companies have access to rich data on the performance of their operations. The technological advances associated with increasing use of automation, advanced analytics, and connected devices mean that this resource constantly improves. But how can organizations best use their data? A crucial part of the answer is instant feedback loops, daily performance dialogues, and routine performance reviews. Maintaining the willingness and ability to hardwire these performance-management processes into the rhythm of daily work isn’t sexy—but over the long run, it’s the most effective route to real, sustainable performance improvements.

Raffaele Carpi is a partner in McKinsey’s Lisbon office , John Douglas is an alumnus of the Houston office , and Frédéric Gascon is a senior vice president of RTS and is based in the Montréal office .

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Job Performance and Employee Engagement Critical Essay

Introduction.

Employee engagement is an evolving concept in the human resource development field and is related to management and organisational psychology. The causes of huge interest to employee engagement include its direct impact on job performance and big potential in enhancing great results.

The topic of work engagement is worth investigation, as it has a great potential in contributing to developing strategies able to ensure the proper functioning of any company (Nolan 2011). This report focuses on investigating the coverage of the topic in literature sources and analysing the approach of McDonalds Company to enhancing employee engagement.

McDonalds is recognized as one of the most successful competitors in the fast-food market. The success of the company is largely based on its effective strategy of promoting the work engagement of people working at it.

The company’s strategy is aimed at promoting employee pride in the business and improving brand perception ( HR Excellence Awards 2011 2011). McDonalds is known as one of the leaders in organising a wide range of education programs for the employees to enhance work engagement (Jackson, Ones & Dilchert 2012).

A careful analysis of relevant literature about employee engagement will be provided to develop a set of characteristics that should be assessed to analyse the employee engagement enhancement strategy of the chosen company.

Literature Review

Though the concept of employee engagement is not clearly defined, there is a big amount of academic literature exploring the issue. The ambiguity of the meaning of the term results in the variety of sources investigating it as referring to different aspects, including traits and behaviours.

Numerous articles and books study the nature of employee engagement, the factors that influence it, and the methods for promoting it. The literature exploring employee engagement can be divided into three groups: works investigating the meaning of employee engagement, works investigating the importance and impact of employee engagement, and works discovering the characteristics crucial to promoting employee engagement.

The works studying the meaning of employee engagement contain numerous debates. The word “engagement” presents the initial source of debate, as it is used to define a psychological state, performance construct, disposition or a combination of the terms mentioned above (Carbonara 2012). Such abundance of definitions causes confusions while determining the nature of employee engagement.

However, lack of precision can be regarded as a natural characteristic of any concept at the early stages of its development. As employee engagement is a new concept in human resource management literature, various authors give different explanations to what the term means and which factors influence it.

The analysis of the central concepts helps to understand that the main debate on the meaning of employee engagement is based on different approaches to defining it as the sum of factors related to the employee’s behaviour and influencing the performance or a sum of impressions related to job satisfaction received by the employee at work (Byrne 2015; Exter 2013; Gruman & Saks 2011).

The most common definition of the term unites these two concepts and characterises employee engagement as the overall job impressions of the employee and his/her commitment to the job (Bhuvanaiah & Raya 2014). These factors directly influence the employee’s willingness to provide a high quality of work and improve job performance.

Various literature sources give explicit explanations on how employee management affects organizations. Though several debates related to the area of company activities most affected by employee engagement exist, most authors agree that it plays a crucial role in improving organisational performance (Gruman & Saks 2011; Mone & London 2014). Engaged employees put more efforts in providing effective performance and strive for the success of the company (Truss et al. 2013).

Bhuvanaiah and Raya (2014) claim that most studies also support the significance of the role of employee engagement in providing positive financial outcomes for the company. Kumar and Pansari (2015) support this statement and emphasise that high level of work engagement is directly associated with profitability growth.

The impact of employee engagement on financial revenues of the organization is supported by numerous literature sources (Byrne 2015; Exter 2013). Kiron (2014) points to another direction of impact of employee engagement – customer engagement. Engaged employees are more likely to contribute to effective relations with customers and benefit customer-driven services (Kiron 2014).

As employee engagement is regarded as influencing the performance and financial revenues of organizations, many literature sources explore the variety of characteristics crucial to increasing it.

Efficacious leadership and management, strong motivation and job satisfaction, and job resources outweighing job demands are the cornerstones of employee engagement largely investigated in the academic literature. The following paragraphs present the analysis of the literature exploring these characteristics influencing employee engagement.

Though many specialists viewed control models as the basis providing appropriate involvement in the past, most of the modern authors agree that interpersonal leadership is one of the keys to promoting employee engagement (Medlin & Green 2014).

Therefore, successful leading instead of controlling is considered one of the biggest contributors to raising the number of engaged employees. “The interpersonal aspect” of relations between leaders and other members of the team should be positive (Hansen, Byrne & Kiersch 2014, p. 34).

Effective management is another characteristic essential for employee engagement. It includes careful selection of the managers, providing appropriate educational activities for them, ensuring the managers’ willingness to care for the employees’ needs, encouraging employees to participate in problem-solving processes, etc. (Byrne 2015; ‘How to increase employee engagement’ 2014).

Besides presenting information about the role of successful leadership in employee engagement, the majority of academic sources put a stress on the importance of ensuring the high level of motivation for the employees.

Such factors as recognition, rewards, meaningfulness of the work, and healthy work environment are recognised as one of the cornerstones of creating motivation for the workers (Morrell 2011; Vitt 2014). Job satisfaction plays a crucial role in motivating the employees, as positive emotions during working hours boost their willingness to be devoted to the company (Hazelton 2014).

Numerous books and articles explore the importance of providing job resources outweighing job demands based on Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model as one of the newest approaches to promoting employee engagement. According to this model, the work environment is divided into two parts.

The first part includes job demands, which can be defined as the features of the job that require special effort that can present a psychological or physiological cost (Gruman & Saks 2011).

The second part includes job resources, which can be defined as those aspects that benefit the worker and initiate a motivational process (Gruman & Saks 2011). Many academic articles emphasize that employee engagement can be boosted if job resources, including financial resources and moral satisfaction, are higher than the job demands (Byrne 2015; Carbonara 2012).

The analysis of relevant literature sources investigating the phenomenon of employee engagement demonstrates a lack of precision in giving a definition of the term. However, an abundance of sources exploring characteristics vital for enhancing employee engagement can be found.

Such characteristics, as efficacious leadership and management, strong motivation and job satisfaction, and job resources outweighing job demands were identified as appropriate for assessing the effectiveness of employee engagement enhancement strategy of the chosen company.

Reference List

Bhuvanaiah, T & Raya, R 2014, ‘Employee engagement: Key to organizational success’, SCMS Journal of Indian Management , vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 61-71.

Byrne, Z 2015, Understanding employee engagement: Theory, research, and practice , Routledge, New York.

Carbonara, S 2012, Manager’s guide to employee engagement , McGraw-Hill, New York.

Exter, N 2013, Employee engagement with sustainable business , Routledge, New York.

Gruman, J & Saks, A 2011, ‘Performance management and employee engagement’, Human Resource Management Review, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 123-136.

Hansen, A, Byrne, Z & Kiersch, C 2014, ‘How interpersonal leadership relates to employee engagement’, Journal of Managerial Psychology , vol. 29, no.8, pp. 953-972.

Hazelton, S 2014, ‘Positive emotions boost employee engagement: Making work fun brings individual and organizational success’, Human Resource Management International Digest , vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 34-37.

‘How to increase employee engagement’ 2014, Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal , vol. 28, no. 6 pp. 24-26.

HR Excellence Awards 2011 – Outstanding Employee Engagement Strategy: McDonald’s 2011. Web.

Jackson, S, Ones, D & Dilchert, S 2012, Managing human resources for environmental sustainability , John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco.

Kiron, D 2014, ‘Tying customer engagement to employee engagement’, MIT Sloan Management Review , vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 1-5.

Kumar, V & Pansari, A 2015, ‘Measuring the benefits of employee engagement’, MIT Sloan Management Review , vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 67-72.

Medlin, B & Green, K 2014, ‘Impact of management basics on employee engagement’, Academy of Strategic Management Journal , vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 21-35.

Mone, E & London, L 2014, Employee engagement through effective performance management , Routledge, New York.

Morrell, F 2011, Ninety steps to employee engagement & staff motivation , Forest Gate Publishing, London.

Nolan, S 2011, ‘Employee engagement’, Strategic HR Review , vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 3-4.

Truss, C, Delbridge, R, Alfes, K, Shantz, A & Soane, E 2014, Employee engagement in theory and practice , Routledge, New York.

Vitt, L 2014, ‘Rising employee engagement through workplace financial education’, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education , vol. 141, pp. 67-77.

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IvyPanda. (2022, November 30). Job Performance and Employee Engagement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/employee-engagement/

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• Personality psychology

Employee psychological well-being and job performance: exploring mediating and moderating mechanisms

International Journal of Organizational Analysis

ISSN : 1934-8835

Article publication date: 12 August 2020

Issue publication date: 7 May 2021

Given the importance of employee psychological well-being to job performance, this study aims to investigate the mediating role of affective commitment between psychological well-being and job performance while considering the moderating role of job insecurity on psychological well-being and affective commitment relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

The data were gathered from employees working in cellular companies of Pakistan using paper-and-pencil surveys. A total of 280 responses were received. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling technique and Hayes’s Model 1.

Findings suggest that affective commitment mediates the association between psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) and employee job performance. In addition, perceived job insecurity buffers the association of psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) and affective commitment.

Practical implications

The study results suggest that fostering employee psychological well-being may be advantageous for the organization. However, if interventions aimed at ensuring job security are not made, it may result in adverse employee work-related attitudes and behaviors.

Originality/value

The study extends the current literature on employee well-being in two ways. First, by examining psychological well-being in terms of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being with employee work-related attitude and behavior. Second, by highlighting the prominent role played by perceived job insecurity in explaining some of these relationships.

• Psychological well-being
• Affective commitment
• Job insecurity
• Job performance
• Eudaimonic wellbeing
• Hedonic wellbeing

Kundi, Y.M. , Aboramadan, M. , Elhamalawi, E.M.I. and Shahid, S. (2021), "Employee psychological well-being and job performance: exploring mediating and moderating mechanisms", International Journal of Organizational Analysis , Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 736-754. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-05-2020-2204

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Yasir Mansoor Kundi, Mohammed Aboramadan, Eissa M.I. Elhamalawi and Subhan Shahid.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Does the employee well-being have important implications both at work and for other aspects of an employees’ life? Of course! For years, we have known that they impact life at work and a plethora of research has examined the impact of employee well-being on work outcomes (Karapinar et al. , 2019 ; Turban and Yan, 2016 ). What is less understood is how employee well-being impacts job performance. Evidence suggests that employee health and well-being are among the most critical factors for organizational success and performance (Bakker et al. , 2019 ; Turban and Yan, 2016 ). Several studies have documented that employee well-being leads to various individual and organizational outcomes such as increased organizational performance and productivity (Hewett et al. , 2018 ), customer satisfaction (Sharma et al. , 2016 ), employee engagement (Tisu et al. , 2020 ) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB; Mousa et al. , 2020 ).

The organizations’ performance and productivity are tied to the performance of its employees (Shin and Konrad, 2017 ). Much evidence has shown the value of employee job performance (i.e. the measurable actions, behaviors and outcomes that employee engages in or bring about which are linked with and contribute to organizational goals; Viswesvaran and Ones, 2017 ) for organizational outcomes and success (Al Hammadi and Hussain, 2019 ; Shin and Konrad, 2017 ), which, in turn, has led scholars to seek to understand what drives employee performance. Personality traits (Tisu et al. , 2020 ), job conditions and organizational characteristics (Diamantidis and Chatzoglou, 2019 ) have all been identified as critical antecedents of employee job performance.

However, one important gap remains in current job performance research – namely, the role of psychological well-being in job performance (Hewett et al. , 2018 ). Although previous research has found happy workers to be more productive than less happy or unhappy workers (DiMaria et al. , 2020 ), a search of the literature revealed few studies on psychological well-being and job performance relationship (Salgado et al. , 2019 ; Turban and Yan, 2016 ). Also, very little is known about the processes that link psychological well-being to job performance. Only a narrow spectrum of well-being related antecedents of employee performance has been considered, especially in terms of psychological well-being. Enriching our understanding of the consequences and processes of psychological well-being in the workplace, the present study examines the relationship between psychological well-being and job performance in the workplace setting. Such knowledge will not only help managers to attain higher organizational performance during the uncertain times but will uncover how to keep employees happy and satisfied (DiMaria et al. , 2020 ).

Crucially, to advance job performance research, more work is needed to examine the relationship between employees’ psychological well-being and their job performance (Ismail et al. , 2019 ). As Salgado et al. (2019) elaborated, we need to consider how an employees’ well-being affects ones’ performance at work. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, the present study seeks to advance job performance research by linking ones’ psychological well-being in terms of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being to ones’ job performance. Hedonic well-being refers to the happiness achieved through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment, while eudaimonic well-being refers to the happiness achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose (Huta, 2016 ; Rahmani et al. , 2018 ). We argue that employees with high levels of psychological well-being will perform well as compared to those having lower levels of psychological well-being. We connect this psychological well-being-job performance process through an employee affective commitment (employees’ perceptions of their emotional attachment to or identification with their organization; Allen and Meyer, 1996 ) – by treating it as a mediating variable between well-being-performance relationship.

Additionally, we also examine the moderating role of perceived job insecurity in the well-being-performance relationship. Perceived job insecurity refers to has been defined as the perception of being threatened by job loss or an overall concern about the continued existence of the job in the future (De Witte et al. , 2015 ). There is evidence that perceived job insecurity diminishes employees’ level of satisfaction and happiness and may lead to adverse job-related outcomes such as decreased work engagement (Karatepe et al. , 2020 ), deviant behavior (Soomro et al. , 2020 ) and reduced employee performance (Piccoli et al. , 2017 ). Thus, addressing the gap mentioned above, this study has two-fold objectives; First, to examine how the path between psychological well-being and job performance is mediated through employee affective commitment. The reason to inquire about this path is that well-being is associated with an employees’ happiness, pleasure and personal growth (Ismail et al. , 2019 ). Therefore, higher the well-being, higher will be the employees’ affective commitment, which, in turn, will lead to enhanced job performance. The second objective is to empirically test the moderating effects of perceived job insecurity on employees’ emotional attachment with their organizations. Thus, we propose that higher job insecurity may reduce the well-being of employees and their interaction may result in lowering employees’ emotional attachment with their organization.

The present study brings together employee well-being and performance literature and contributes to these research areas in two ways. First, we contribute to this line of inquiry by investigating the direct and indirect crossover from hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being to employees’ job performance. We propose that psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) influence job performance through employee affective commitment. Second, prior research shows that the effect of well-being varies across individuals indicating the presence of possible moderators influencing the relationship between employee well-being and job outcomes (Lee, 2019 ). We, therefore, extend the previous literature by proposing and demonstrating the general possibility that perceived job insecurity might moderate the relationship of psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) and affective commitment. While there is evidence that perceived job insecurity influence employees’ affective commitment (Schumacher et al. , 2016 ), what is not yet clear is the impact of perceived job insecurity on psychological well-being − affective commitment relationship. The proposed research model is depicted in Figure 1 .

2. Hypotheses development

2.1 psychological well-being and affective commitment.

Well-being is a broad concept that refers to individuals’ valued experience (Bandura, 1986 ) in which they become more effective in their work and other activities (Huang et al. , 2016 ). According to Diener (2009) , well-being as a subjective term, which describes people’s happiness, the fulfillment of wishes, satisfaction, abilities and task accomplishments. Employee well-being is further categorized into two types, namely, hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being (Ballesteros-Leiva et al. , 2017 ). Compton et al. (1996) investigated 18 scales that assess employee well-being and found that all the scales are categorized into two broad categories, namely, subjective well-being and personal growth. The former is referred to as hedonic well-being (Ryan and Deci, 2000 ) whereas, the latter is referred to as eudaimonic well-being (Waterman, 1993 ).

Hedonic well-being is based on people’s cognitive component (i.e. people’s conscious assessment of all aspects of their life; Diener et al. , 1985 ) and affective component (i.e. people’s feelings that resulted because of experiencing positive or negative emotions in reaction to life; Ballesteros-Leiva et al. , 2017 ). In contrast, eudaimonic well-being describes people’s true nature and realization of their actual potential (Waterman, 1993 ). Eudaimonic well-being corresponds to happy life based upon ones’ self-reliance and self-truth (Ballesteros-Leiva et al. , 2017 ). Diener et al. (1985) argued that hedonic well-being focuses on happiness and has a more positive affect and greater life satisfaction, and focuses on pleasure, happiness and positive emotions (Ryan and Deci, 2000 ; Ryff, 2018 ). Contrarily, eudaimonic well-being is different from hedonic well-being as it focuses on true self and personal growth (Waterman, 1993 ), recognition for ones’ optimal ability and mastery ( Ryff, 2018 ). In the past, it has been found that hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being are relatively correlated with each other but are distinct concepts (Sheldon et al. , 2018 ).

To date, previous research has measured employee psychological well-being with different indicators such as thriving at work (Bakker et al. , 2019 ), life satisfaction (Clark et al. , 2019 ) and social support (Cai et al. , 2020 ) or general physical or psychological health (Grey et al. , 2018 ). Very limited studies have measured psychological well-being with hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, which warrants further exploration (Ballesteros-Leiva et al. , 2017 ). Therefore, this study assesses employee psychological well-being based upon two validated measures, namely, hedonic well-being (people’s satisfaction with life in general) and eudaimonic well-being (people’s personal accomplishment feelings).

Employee well-being has received some attention in organization studies (Huang et al. , 2016 ). Prior research has argued that happier and healthier employees increase their effort, performance and productivity (Huang et al. , 2016 ). Similarly, research has documented that employee well-being has a positive influence on employee work-related attitudes and behaviors such as, increasing OCB (Mousa et al. , 2020 ), as well as job performance (Magnier-Watanabe et al. , 2017 ) and decreasing employees’ work-family conflict (Karapinar et al. , 2019 ) and absenteeism (Schaumberg and Flynn, 2017 ). Although there is evidence that employee well-being positively influences employee work-related attitudes, less is known about the relationship between psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) and employee affective commitment (Pan et al. , 2018 ; Semedo et al. , 2019 ). Moreover, the existing literature indicated that employee affective commitment is either used as an antecedent or an outcome variable of employee well-being (Semedo et al. , 2019 ; Ryff, 2018 ). However, affective commitment as an outcome variable of employee well-being has gained less scholarly attention, which warrants further investigation. Therefore, in the present study, we seek to examine employee affective commitment as an outcome variable of employee psychological well-being because employees who are happy and satisfied in their lives are more likely to be attached to their organizations (Semedo et al. , 2019 ).

Hedonic well-being positively predicts employee affective commitment.

Eudaimonic well-being positively predicts employee affective commitment.

2.2 Affective commitment and job performance

The concept of organizational commitment was first initiated by sit-bet theory in the early 1960s (Becker, 1960 ). Organizational commitment is defined as the psychological connection of employees to the organization and involvement in it (Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005 ). It is also defined as the belief of an individual in his or her organizational norms (Hackett et al. , 2001 ); the loyalty of an employee toward the organization (Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005 ) and willingness of an employee to participate in organizational duties (Williams and Anderson, 1991 ).

Organizational commitment is further categorized into three correlated but distinct categories (Meyer et al. , 1993 ), known as affective, normative and continuance. In affective commitment, employees are emotionally attached to their organization. In normative commitment, employees remain committed to their organizations due to the sense of obligation to serve. While in continuance commitment, employees remain committed to their organization because of the costs associated with leaving the organization (Allen and Meyer, 1990 , p. 2). Among the dimensions of organizational commitment, affective commitment has been found to have the most substantial influence on organizational outcomes (Meyer and Herscovitch, 2001 ). It is a better predictor of OCB (Paul et al. , 2019 ), low turnover intention (Kundi et al. , 2018 ) and job performance (Jain and Sullivan, 2019 ).

Affective commitment positively predict employee job performance.

2.3 Affective commitment as a mediator

Many studies had used the construct of affective commitment as an independent variable, mediator and moderating variable because of its importance as an effective determinant of work outcomes such as low turnover intention, job satisfaction and job performance (Jain and Sullivan, 2019 ; Kundi et al. , 2018 ). There is very little published research on employee well-being and affective commitment relationship. Surprisingly, the effects of employee psychological well-being in terms of hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being have not been closely examined.

Affective commitment mediates the association between hedonic well-being and job performance.

Affective commitment mediates the association between eudaimonic well-being and job performance.

2.4 The moderating role of job insecurity

Job insecurity is gaining importance because of the change in organizational structure as it is becoming flattered, change in the nature of the job as it requires a diverse skill set and change in human resource (HR) practices as more temporary workers are hired nowadays (Piccoli et al. , 2017 ; Kundi et al. , 2018 ). Such changes have caused several adverse outcomes such as job dissatisfaction (Bouzari and Karatepe, 2018 ), unethical pro-organizational behavior (Ghosh, 2017 ), poor performance (Piccoli et al. , 2017 ), anxiety and lack of commitment (Wang et al. , 2018 ).

Lack of harmony on the definition of job insecurity can be found among the researchers. However, a majority of them acknowledge that job insecurity is subjective and can be referred to as a subjective perception (Wang et al. , 2018 ). Furthermore, job insecurity is described as the perception of an employee regarding the menace of losing a job in the near future (De Witte et al. , 2015 ). When there is job insecurity, employees experience a sense of threat to the continuance and stability of their jobs (Shoss, 2017 ).

Although job insecurity has been found to influence employee work-related attitudes, less is known about its effects on behavioral outcomes (Piccoli et al. , 2017 ). As maintained by the social exchange theory, behaviors are the result of an exchange process (Blau, 1964 ). Furthermore, these exchanges can be either tangible or socio-emotional aspects of the exchange process (Kundi et al. , 2018 ). Employees who perceive and feel that their organization is providing them job security and taking care of their well-being will turn to be more committed to their organization (Kundi et al. , 2018 ; Wang et al. , 2018 ). Much research has found that employees who feel job security are happier and satisfied with their lives (Shoss, 2017 ; De Witte et al. , 2015 ) and are more committed to their work and organization (Bouzari and Karatepe, 2018 ; Wang et al. , 2018 ). Shoss (2017) conducted a thorough study on job insecurity and found that job insecurity can cause severe adverse consequences for both the employees and organizations.

Employees who are uncertain about their jobs (i.e. high level of perceived job insecurity) are less committed with their organizations.

Employees with temporary job contracts were found to have low organizational committed as compared to the employees with permanent job contracts.

Such a difference between temporary and permanent job contract holders was mainly due to the perceived job insecurity by the temporary job contract holders.

Job insecurity will moderate the relationship between hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being and affective organizational commitment.

3.1 Sample and procedure

The data for this study came from a survey of Pakistani employees, who worked in five private telecommunication organizations (Mobilink, Telenor, Ufone, Zong and Warid). These five companies were targeted because they are the largest and highly competitive companies in Pakistan. Moreover, the telecom sector is a private sector where jobs are temporary or contractual (Kundi et al. , 2018 ). Hence, the investigation of how employees’ perceptions of job insecurity influence their psychological well-being and its outcomes is highly relevant in this context. Studies exploring such a phenomenon are needed, particularly in the Pakistani context, to have a better insight and thereby strengthen the employee well-being and job performance literature.

Two of the authors had personal and professional contacts to gain access to these organizations. The paper-and-pencil method was used to gather the data. Questionnaires were distributed among 570 participants with a cover letter explaining the purpose of the study, noted that participation was voluntary, and provided assurances that their responses would be kept confidential and anonymous. After completion of the questionnaires, the surveys were collected the surveys on-site by one of the authors. As self-reported data often render itself to common method bias (CMB; Podsakoff et al. , 2012 ), we applied several procedural remedies such as reducing the ambiguity in the questions, ensuring respondent anonymity and confidentiality, separating of the predictor and criterion variable and randomizing the item order to limit this bias.

Of the 570 surveys distributed initially, 280 employees completed the survey form (response rate = 49%). According to Baruch and Holtom (2008) , the average response rate for studies at the individual level is 52.6% (SD = 19.7). Hence, our response rate meets the standard for a minimum acceptable response rate, which is 49%. Of the 280 respondents, 39% were female, their mean age was 35.6 years (SD = 5.22) and the average organizational tenure was 8.61 years (SD  =  4.21). The majority of the respondents had at least a bachelors’ degree (83 %). Respondents represented a variety of departments, including marketing (29%), customer services (26%), finance (20%), IT (13%) and HR (12%).

3.2 Measures

The survey was administered to the participants in English. English is the official language of correspondence for professional organizations in Pakistan (De Clercq et al. , 2019 ). All the constructs came from previous research and anchored on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = Strongly disagree to 5 = Strongly agree.

Psychological well-being. We measured employee psychological well-being with two sub-dimensions, namely, hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being was measured using five items (Diener et al. , 1985 ). A sample item is “my life conditions are excellent” ( α = 0.86). Eudaimonic well-being was measured using 21 items (Waterman et al. , 2010 ), of which seven items were reverse-scored due to its negative nature. Sample items are “I feel that I understand what I was meant to do in my life” and “my life is centered around a set of core beliefs that give meaning to my life” ( α = 0.81).

Affective commitment. The affective commitment was measured using a six-item inventory developed by Allen and Meyer (1990) . The sample items are “my organization inspires me to put forth my best effort” and “I think that I will be able to continue working here” ( α = 0.91).

Job insecurity. Job insecurity was measured using a five-item inventory developed by Chirumbolo et al. (2015) . The sample item is “I fear I will lose my job” ( α = 0.87).

Job performance . We measured employee job performance with the seven-item inventory developed by Williams and Anderson (1991) . The sample items are “I do fulfill my responsibilities, which are mentioned in the job description” and “I try to work as hard as possible” ( α = 0.87).

Controls. We controlled for respondents’ age (assessed in years), gender (1 = male, 2 = female) and organizational tenure (assessed in years) because prior research (Alessandri et al. , 2019 ; Edgar et al. , 2020 ) has found significant effects of these variables on employees’ job performance.

4.1 Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations and correlations among study variables.

4.2 Construct validity

Before testing hypotheses, we conducted a series of confirmatory factor analyzes (CFAs) using AMOS 22.0 to examine the distinctiveness of our study variables. Following the guidelines of Hu and Bentler (1999) , model fitness was assessed with following fit indices; comparative fit index (CFI), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR). We used a parceling technique (Little et al. , 2002 ) to ensure item to sample size ratio. According to Williams and O’Boyle (2008) , the item-parceling approach is widely used in HRM research, which allows estimation of fewer model parameters and subsequently leads to the optimal variable to sample size ratio and stable parameter estimates (Wang and Wang, 2019 ). Based on preliminary CFAs, we combined the highest item loading with the lowest item loading to create parcels that were equally balanced in terms of their difficulty and discrimination. Item-parceling was done only for the construct of eudaimonic well-being as it entailed a large number of items (i.e. 21 items). Accordingly, we made five parcels for the eudaimonic well-being construct (Waterman et al. , 2010 ).

As shown in Table 2 , the CFA results revealed that the baseline five‐factor model (hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, job insecurity, affective commitment and job performance) was significant ( χ 2 = 377.11, df = 199, CFI = 0.971, RMSEA = 0.034 and SRMR = 0.044) and better than the alternate models, including a four‐factor model in which hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being were considered as one construct (Δ χ 2 = 203.056, Δdf = 6), a three-factor model in which hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being and affective commitment were loaded on one construct (Δ χ 2 = 308.99, Δdf = 8) and a one‐factor model in which all items loaded on one construct (Δ χ 2 = 560.77, Δdf = 11). The results, therefore, provided support for the distinctive nature of our study variables.

To ensure the validity of our measures, we first examined the convergent validity through the average variance extracted (AVE). We found AVE scores higher than the threshold value of 0.5 ( Table 1 ; Fornell and Larcker, 1981 ), supporting the convergent validity of our constructs. We also estimated discriminant validity by comparing the AVE of each construct with the average shared variance (ASV), i.e. mean of the squared correlations among constructs ( Hair et al. , 2010 ). As expected, all the values of AVE were higher than the ASV constructs, thereby supporting discriminant validity ( Table 1 ).

4.3 Common method variance

Harman’s one-factor test.

CFA ( Podsakoff et al. , 2012 ).

Harman’s one-factor test showed five factors with eigenvalues of greater than 1.0 accounted for 69.12% of the variance in the exogenous and endogenous variables. The results of CFA showed that the single-factor model did not fit the data well ( χ 2 = 937.88, df = 210, CFI = 0.642, RMSEA = 0.136, SRMR = 0.122). These tests showed that CMV was not a major issue in this study.

4.4 Hypotheses testing

The hypotheses pertaining to mediation were tested using a structural model in AMOS 22.0 ( Figure 2 ), which had an acceptable goodness of fit ( χ 2 = 298.01, df = 175, CFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.04 and SRMR = 0.04). Hypotheses about moderation were tested in SPSS (25 th edition) using PROCESS Model I ( Hayes, 2017 ; Table 3 ).

H1a and H1b suggested that hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being positively relate to employee affective commitment. According to Figure 2 , the results indicate that hedonic well-being ( β = 0.26, p < 0.01) and eudaimonic well-being ( β = 0.32, p < 0.01) are positively related to employee affective commitment. Taken together, these two findings provide support for H1a and H1b . In H2 , we predicted that employee affective commitment would positively associate with employee job performance. As seen in Figure 2 , employee affective commitment positively predicted employee job performance ( β = 0.41, p < 0.01), supporting H2 .

H3a and H3b suggested that employee affective commitment mediates the relationship between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being and employee job performance. According to Figure 2 , the results indicate that hedonic well-being is positively related to employee job performance via employee affective commitment ( β = 0.11, 95% CI = 0.09; 0.23). Similarly, eudaimonic well-being is positively related to employee job performance via employee affective commitment ( β = 0.15, 95% CI = 0.12; 0.35), supporting H3a and H3b .

Hedonic well-being.

Eudaimonic well-being and employee affective commitment.

In support of H4a , our results ( Table 3 ) revealed a negative and significant interaction effect between hedonic well-being and job insecurity on employee affective commitment ( β = −0.12, p < 0.05). The pattern of this interaction was consistent with our hypothesized direction; the positive relationship between hedonic well-being and employee affective commitment was weaker in the presence of high versus low job insecurity ( Figure 3 ). Likewise, the interaction effect between eudaimonic well-being and job insecurity on employee affective commitment was negatively significant ( β = −0.28, p < 0.01). The pattern of this interaction was consistent with our hypothesized direction; the positive relationship between eudaimonic well-being and employee affective commitment was weaker in the presence of high versus low job insecuritay ( Figure 4 ). Thus, H4a and H4b were supported. The pattern of these interactions was consistent with our hypothesized direction; the positive relationship of hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being with an employee affective commitment were weaker in the presence of high versus low perceived job insecurity.

5. Discussion

The present research examined the direct and indirect crossover from psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) to job performance through employee affective commitment and the moderating role of job insecurity between psychological well-being and affective commitment relationship. The results revealed that both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being has a direct and indirect effect on employee job performance. Employee affective commitment was found to be a potential mediating mechanism (explaining partial variance) in the relationship between psychological well-being and job performance. Findings regarding the buffering role of job insecurity revealed that job insecurity buffers the positive relationship between psychological well-being and employee affective commitment such that higher the job insecurity, lower will be employee affective commitment. The findings generally highlight and reinforce that perceived job insecurity can be detrimental for both employees’ well-being and job-related behaviors (Soomro et al. , 2020 ).

5.1 Theoretical implications

The present study offers several contributions to employee well-being and job performance literature. First, the present research extends the employee well-being literature by investigating employee affective commitment as a key mechanism through which psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) influences employees’ job performance. In line with SDT, we found that both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being enhanced employees’ affective commitment, which, in turn, led them to perform better in their jobs. Our study addresses recent calls for research to understand better how psychological well-being influence employees’ performance at work (Huang et al. , 2016 ), and adds to a growing body of work, which confirms the importance of psychological well-being in promoting work-related attitudes and behaviors (Devonish, 2016 ; Hewett et al. , 2018 ; Ismail et al. , 2019 ). Further, we have extended the literature on employee affective commitment, highlighting that psychological well-being is an important antecedent of employee’ affective commitment and thereby confirming previous research by Aboramadan et al. (2020) on the links between affective commitment and job performance.

Second, our results provide empirical support for the efficacy of examining the different dimensions of employee well-being, i.e. hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being as opposed to an overall index of well-being at work. Specifically, our results revealed that both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being boost both employees’ attachment with his or her organization and job performance (Hewett et al. , 2018 ; Luu, 2019 ). Among the indicators of psychological well-being, eudaimonic well-being (i.e. realization and fulfillment of ones’ true nature) was found to have more influence on employee affective commitment and job performance as compared to hedonic well-being (i.e. state of happiness and sense of flourishing in life). Therefore, employees who experience high levels of psychological well-being are likely to be more attached to their employer, which, in turn, boosts their job performance.

Third, job insecurity is considered as an important work-related stressor (Schumacher et al. , 2016 ). However, the moderating role of job insecurity on the relationship between psychological well-being and affective commitment has not been considered by the previous research. Based on social exchange theory (Blau, 1964 ), we expected job insecurity to buffer the positive relationship between the psychological well-being and affective commitment. The results showed that employees with high levels of perceived job insecurity reduce the positive relationship of psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) and affective commitment. This finding is consistent with previous empirical evidence supporting the adverse role of perceived job insecurity in reducing employees’ belongingness with their organization (Jiang and Lavaysse, 2018 ). There is strong empirical evidence (Qian et al. , 2019 ; Schumacher et al. , 2016 ) that employee attitudes and health are negatively affected by increasing levels of job insecurity. Schumacher et al. (2016) suggested in an elaborate explanation of the social exchange theory that the constant worrying about the possibility of losing ones’ job promotes psychological stress and feelings of unfairness, which, in turn, affects employees’ affective commitment. Hence, employees’ psychological well-being and affective commitment are heavily influenced by the experience of high job insecurity.

5.2 Practical implications

Our study has several implications. First and foremost, this study will help managers in understanding the importance of employees’ psychological well-being for work-related attitudes and behavior. Based on our findings, managers need to understand how important psychological well-being is for employees’ organizational commitment and job performance. According to Hosie and Sevastos (2009) , several human resource-based interventions could foster employees’ psychological well-being, such as selecting and placing employees into appropriate positions, ensuring a friendly work environment and providing training that improves employees’ mental health and help them to manage their perceptions positively.

Besides, managers should provide their employees with opportunities to use their full potential, which will increase employees’ sense of autonomy and overall well-being (Sharma et al. , 2017 ). By promoting employee well-being in the workplace, managers can contribute to developing a workforce, which will be committed to their organizations and will have better job performance. However, based on our findings, in the presence of job insecurity, organizations spending on interventions to improve employees’ psychological well-being, organizational commitment and job performance might go in vain. In other words, organizations should ensure that employees feel a sense of job security or else the returns on such interventions could be nullified.

Finally, as organizations operate in a volatile and highly competitive environment, it is and will be difficult for them to provide high levels of job security to their employees, especially in developing countries such as Pakistan (Soomro et al. , 2020 ). Given the fact that job insecurity leads to cause adverse employee psychological well-being and affective commitment, managers must be attentive to subordinates’ perceptions of job insecurity and adverse psychological well-being and take action to prevent harmful consequences (Ma et al. , 2019 ). Organizations should try to avoid downsizings, layoffs and other types of structural changes, respectively, and find ways to boost employees’ perceptions of job security despite those changes. If this is not possible, i.e. the organization not able to provide job security, this should be communicated to employees honestly and early.

5.3 Limitations and future studies

There are several limitations to this study. First, we measured our research variables by using a self-report survey at a single point of time, which may result in CMB. We used various procedural remedies to mitigate the potential for CMB and conducted CFA as per the guidelines of Podsakoff et al. (2012) to ensure that CMV was unlikely to be an issue in our study. However, future research may rely on supervisors rated employees’ job performance or collect data at different time points to avoid the threat of such bias.

Second, the sample of this study consisted of employees working in cellular companies of Pakistan with different demographic characteristics and occupational backgrounds; thus, the generalizability of our findings to other industries or sectors is yet to be established. Future research should test our research model in various industries and cultures.

A final limitation pertains to the selection of a moderating variable. As this study was conducted in Pakistan, contextual factors such as the perceived threat to terrorism, law and order situation or perceived organizational injustice might also influence the psychological well-being of employees working in Pakistan (Jahanzeb et al. , 2020 ; Sarwar et al. , 2020 ). Future studies could consider the moderating role of such external factors in the relationship between employee psychological well-being, affective commitment and job performance.

6. Conclusion

This study proposed a framework to understand the relationship between employee psychological well-being, affective commitment and job performance. It also described how psychological well-being influences job performance. Additionally, this study examined the moderating role of perceived job insecurity on psychological well-being and affective commitment relationship. The results revealed that employee psychological well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic) has beneficial effects on employee affective commitment, which, in turn, enhance their job performance. Moreover, the results indicated that perceived job insecurity has ill effects on employee affective commitment, especially when the employee has high levels of perceived job insecurity.

Research model

Structural model with standardized coefficients; N = 280

Interactive effect of hedonic well-being and job insecurity on employee affective commitment

Interactive effect of eudaimonic well-being and job insecurity on employee affective commitment

Descriptive statistics and correlations among of variables

* p < 0.05,

** p < 0.01; Unstandardized coefficients and average bootstrap estimates are stated; demographic variables are controlled; bootstrapping procedure [5,000 iterations, bias-corrected, 95% CI]

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Further reading

Sabella , A.R. , El-Far , M.T. and Eid , N.L. ( 2016 ), “ The effects of organizational and job characteristics on employees' organizational commitment in arts-and-culture organizations ”, International Journal of Organizational Analysis , Vol. 24 No. 5 , pp. 1002 - 1024 .

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Funding and Support statement : The authors did not receive any external funding or additional support from third parties for this work.

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The Importance Of Job Performance

Show More Job performance is a topic that has been studied frequently due to its importance for organizations. An organization’s success depends on how well employees are performing their jobs, so it is critical for organizations to understand this importance and how to improve their employees’ performance. There are a variety of antecedents of job performance that can shed light on how to improve performance levels as well as lead to desired organizational outcomes. For example, personality, employee health, and employee engagement are a few antecedents that are fundamental for organizations to explore in order to promote job performance and positive organizational outcomes. One antecedent that is frequently researched is employees’ personality. Joyce …show more content… One of the findings within this article indicates that depression, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, aspects of overall psychological health, have a moderate-to-strong correlation to job performance. Since employ engagement has been referred to a psychological state, the degree to which these factors exist within employees plays a potential role for indicating if an employee will be engaged while working. Employees who are depressed and have low life satisfaction may not have the enthusiasm or vigor that is present within engagement. In addition, they may not be motivated to achieve goals or performance standards, which can negatively impact their job performance and appraisal ratings. In addition to psychological health, Ford et al., (2011) also found that ill-health is associated with large decreased in job performance. Literature has consistently shown that high blood pressure, or hypertension, was negatively related to performance due to the inefficient use of the cardiovascular system that can limit the ability to perform work-related tasks. This implies that physical health needs to be considered in conjunction with psychological health to ensure that employees are not limited in their ability to perform on the …show more content… Highly engaged employees can promote innovation, higher levels of productivity, and increased bottom-line performance as well as reduce the cost of hiring and retention (“The Impact of Employee,” 2013). These outcomes can help organizations gain competitive advantage within their markets by increasing productivity and performance while reducing costs and developing more innovative ideas or products. In addition, this article also noted that high levels of customer service are important for reaching organizational success, which can be done by having engaged employees interacting with customers. Another important outcome is effectiveness, which, according to Hogan and Holland (2003), can be predicted by transformational leadership, which is related to Intellect-Openness to Experience. Similarly, Hogan and Holland (2003) also mentioned that different personality types and behaviors can lead employees to either try to get along or get ahead within their organization. In order to get along, employees need to cooperate, be friendly, and be positive. These employees are likely to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors, which is thought to be an aspect of performance, as well as contextual performance. These behaviors are thought to be related to personal discipline and facilitating performance within peers and teams. However, in order to

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Summary: The Importance Of Employee Performance

Employee performance is one of the most factors that effect on the performance of the organization. The successful organization understands the importance of HR practices as a critical factor directly affects and contributes on the performance (AL-Qudah, M. K. M., Osman, A., Ab Halim, M. S., & Al-Shatanawi, H. A., 2014). The success of any organization depend on its employees behavior and their decision, although there are many other factors contribute in that success, such as the organization size, the environment in what it operate and its activities. Employee performance within an organization can be defined with a variety of ways including their behavior, attitude and motivation to achieve goals (Ali and Jadoon, 2012). Performance is associated …show more content…

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What Is Job Satisfaction and Why Is It Important?

Are you aware of what right  actually means?

Determining whether you are satisfied with your job, whether it is right for you, and why that is important often involves personal intuition and circumstances. For some people, the right job might entail earning a certain salary. For others, the right job might involve having a supportive team.

With more than 21,000 participants in their study, researchers Dobrow, Ganzach, and Liu (2018) found that over a 40-year span, people who stayed in the same organization over time became less satisfied, and people who moved to different organizations over time became happier.

What does this mean? Does job satisfaction come from staying in an organization or leaving it? If someone were to stay in an organization, what would retain their satisfaction?

In this article, we will explore just that and more, including divulging the ingredients of job satisfaction, real-life examples of it, and how it relates to motivation.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Work & Career Coaching Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify opportunities for professional growth and create a more meaningful career.

This Article Contains:

What is job satisfaction, 10 proven ingredients for job satisfaction, is job satisfaction important 4 benefits, 2 real-life examples, a note on job satisfaction and motivation, positivepsychology.com’s job satisfaction tools, a take-home message.

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

You have probably heard that quote before, yet it may still have relevance today. It makes us ask whether emotions like happiness, stress, and anxiety play an important role in job satisfaction.

The aptly titled Job Satisfaction (Hoppock, 1935) defines job satisfaction as any combination of psychological, physiological, and environmental circumstances that cause a person to truthfully say that they are satisfied with a job.

Going a little deeper and fast-forwarding to this century, job satisfaction has been called a set of favorable or unfavorable feelings and emotions with which employees view their work (Karatepe, Uludag, Menevis, Hadzimehmedagic, & Baddar, 2006).

Before we get to favorable feelings or proven ingredients for job satisfaction, let’s first assess what leads to those unfavorable feelings.

The graphic above from the University of Southern California’s Applied Psychology Program shows some factors that make American employees unhappy or burnt out with jobs.

Many of us have experienced unhappiness because of these factors and more at some point in our careers. Let’s take a look at what can be done to satisfy ourselves in a job.

Although it is subjective, job satisfaction research (Kumari, 2011) has showcased the following:

1. Communication

Communication can be extremely important to retaining levels of satisfaction, on both a personal and professional level. It is exhibited in allowing employees to be open, collaborative, trustworthy, and even confrontational when needed.

Defining a company culture links to job satisfaction as it provides values and guidance about topics ranging from organizational goals to appropriate levels of interaction between employees.

3. Security

It’s no surprise that once a culture is established in a workplace, satisfaction can then be enhanced by added feelings of security. Security may arise from knowing you work for a viable company with long-term goals, insinuating feelings of belonging to that company (Berg, Grant, & Johnson, 2010). This can be enhanced by having honest communication and transparency within a company.

4. Leadership

Tied into increased motivation for employees, leadership, or influencing a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals (Kinicki & Kreitner, 2006), can lead to job satisfaction by making sure communication and instruction of tasks is adequate and easily understood.

In turn, when employees feel that leaders can guide them through tasks, their motivation and satisfaction increases.

With leadership having a crucial influence on job satisfaction, this related article with leadership activities  is a recommended read.

5. Opportunities

Employees can gain more satisfaction with their job when more challenging opportunities arise. This can lead to participation in interesting and diverse projects and get employees away from the monotony of a role.

6. Career development

Employees can become more satisfied with their job when they know there is an individualized plan for them. Beyond the formal nature of appraisals, if there is a path in place for growth, this can encourage employees to stay happier for longer.

7. Working conditions

Job satisfaction can be increased if a resilient workplace is a cooperative environment. This means a place with respect for diverse ideas and opinions, honest and constructive feedback, mentoring opportunities, and freedom from harassment.

8. Employee personality

Most ingredients linked to job satisfaction may have roots in elements outside of the employees’ control (such as leadership from managers and communication from company leaders), but what about the employees themselves? Can they control their own levels of satisfaction? Bakker, Tims, and Derks (2012) talk about just that.

These researchers discuss how job satisfaction can be determined by how proactive the employee is at work. Does the employee proactively seek out a manager for feedback? Does the employee go the extra mile to achieve tasks within a company? Does the employee try to stick to company goals, lead meetings, and ask questions when unsure about how to complete a task?

If yes, these employees are ones who can show more satisfaction in the workplace. Proactiveness in the workplace can lead to positive job appraisals, which when fed back to the employee, can lead to satisfaction.

For more on constructive feedback, read our article discussing ways to give negative feedback  constructively.

9. Pay and benefits

Organizational success and job satisfaction are also linked to employees’ perceptions of adequate pay and benefits (Edwards, 2008).

While pay and benefits are not the only reason employees find satisfaction in their workplaces, research going back more than 30 years (e.g., Gerhart, 1987) shows that pay and benefits, at least according to how employees view themselves in their roles, has ranked high on lists of job satisfaction factors.

10. Rewards and recognition

Beyond monetary gain and being paid fairly for the work they do, job satisfaction for employees means that promotional policies are unambiguous and in line with their expectations.

A key finding here (Kumari, 2011) is that satisfaction at a job is not exclusively linked to pay, but to the perceived fairness of how one is recognized at work for achievements.

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Help others redesign their work. This manual and the accompanying client workbook outline a seven-session coaching trajectory for you, the practitioner, to expertly guide others through their own unique job crafting journey.

We have already discussed what employees look for in achieving and maintaining job satisfaction. But why is it important? And why should organizations care?

First, it is a primary responsibility of organizations to ascertain that employees are satisfied with their jobs through measurements, but also to find out the causes of dissatisfaction when employees are not feeling satisfied (McBride, 2002).

Tools such as the following help measure some important factors that go into employees’ job satisfaction (Spector, 1997, chapter 2):

• Job Satisfaction Survey (Spector, 1985)
• Job Description Index (Castanheira, 2014)
• The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss, Dawis, and England, 1967)

As to why job satisfaction is so important, the Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement Report from the Society for Human Resource Management (Lee et al., 2016) notes four benefits of making sure employees are satisfied with their work.

1. Increased profits

This is one any manager and employee might appreciate. Keeping employees satisfied can lead to higher sales, lower costs, and a stronger bottom line.

2. Higher productivity

Irrespective of their job titles or salary, employees who are more satisfied with their job, whether they feel satisfied with the organizational culture, with the rewards they are getting, or with recognition, can produce more and do it more efficiently.

3. Lower turnover

If employees are more satisfied with their job, they are less likely to leave. It also helps to recruit better quality talent as new talent sees employee staying power as added value.

When employees feel there is a growth path for them, they are more satisfied. In turn, because they feel the organization has their best interests at heart, they tend to support the organization’s mission and objectives. When this happens, employees may tell their friends or relatives about the good nature of the organization, which helps spread organizational goodwill.

The Job Satisfaction Wheel can help assess your current job satisfaction and identify improvement areas. Job satisfaction measures subjective wellbeing at work (Judge & Klinger, 2008).

According to Roelen et al. (2008), there are seven key indicators of job satisfaction:

• Task variety
• Working conditions
• Education and development opportunities
• Person-environment fit

Here’s how you can use the Job Satisfaction Wheel:

• Rate the seven job satisfaction domains on a scale from one – “not at all satisfied” to ten – “completely satisfied”. Place a circle around each score on the wheel.
• Connect your scores by drawing a line and forming an inner wheel. This gives you an overview of how satisfied you are with your current job.
• Looking at the wheel, where do you see areas for improvement? What would it take to improve the score? Which action steps can you take?

Honesty and communication about a company’s objectives and goals can be vital and are linked to job satisfaction for employees. But do employees only care about company success? How does honest communication impact their own, individual success?

The importance of honesty and communication

Agarwal and Mehta (2014) were interested in employee job satisfaction within the IT industry.

Their curiosity stemmed from the idea that IT employees may largely be working in isolation, away from other employees, and the researchers wondered if employees valued appraisals more in such circumstances than in other industries. They discussed how performance appraisal was directly linked to satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) for the employee.

Additionally, they also discuss how honest and consistent communication and regular updates of employee progress (bi-annual rather than yearly appraisals) can not only increase employee satisfaction at work, but also help companies by decreasing the rate of attrition. Interestingly enough, Agarwal and Mehta (2014) did not discuss company goals or performance in their findings.

Let’s take a look at some familiar companies you may have heard of.

Although the phrase “the customer is always right” may be common, it does not seem to ring all true behind the scenes (or the counter, in this case).

The CEO’s mantra was that if managers look out for employees, employees will look after customers. To do this, he offered health insurance to all employees despite the excessive cost and being advised against it.

Is it surprising that good leadership strengths , recognition, and reward given to employees increased job satisfaction and in turn increased profits for Starbucks? It certainly fits in line with the aforementioned research in this article.

While also producing satisfied end-users like us when using Google’s products, Google puts a lot of work into job satisfaction for its employees as well.

It’s interesting to note that Google does not care (perhaps as much) about employee titles, but more about what type of leaders its employees are, or emergent leadership. This draws us back to the importance of positive leadership in job satisfaction.

Gillett (2016) writes that Google attracts talent with competitive pay and keeps employees satisfied by allowing telecommuting. This may show an appreciation for work–life balance and retention.

Gillett also writes that according to compensation and data company PayScale, nearly three-quarters of Google employees find their jobs meaningful, citing that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

She describes Google employees thinking that their goal of working at Google is a moral rather than a business goal, which in turn creates motivation to innovate and push into new areas.

These sound like great organizational goals that drive profits. Furthermore, Google staff certainly demonstrate that job satisfaction can indeed lead to employees supporting the organization’s goals and objectives.

According to Latham (2012), motivation is a cognitive resource allocation process in which a person makes choices as to the time and energy to be allocated to an array of motives or tasks. The key word here seems to be choice .

When an employee is able to make a choice, they feel more motivated to perform a task. When an employee is more motivated to perform and complete a task, this tends to be linked with higher job satisfaction (Jalagat, 2016).

Choice, as directed or allowed by organizational policy, can lead to further motivation and, in turn, job satisfaction as well as performance. This seems to be echoed by the work of Ilies and Judge (2003).

Ilies and Judge (2003) discuss how leaders interact with employees, specifically by talking to them more as a person, and how assigning tasks and providing a career path can affect their motivation level.

When determining job satisfaction, it is key to remember that human factors such as motivation, excitement, satisfaction, and dissatisfaction must be considered. This is clearly indicated by the Starbucks example.

When employees are encouraged to be great leaders and to engage in challenging opportunities, such as at Google, they can end up feeling more satisfied with their job.

As one of the key ingredients of job satisfaction, communication among employees, managers, and staff cannot be underestimated.

However, communication is not automatically generated or achieved right away. When introducing new employees into a workplace, it may be even more important to establish good and fun communication procedures between employees.

This helpful article with work-related communication games and exercises can help improve communication at the workplace.

For other ways to establish happiness in the workplace , this article offers a guide and tips for making employees happier.

To determine your own job satisfaction, you need to do an assessment of your strengths and skills. This tool guides you to complete a Strengths In Challenging Times worksheet in order to do exactly that.

Another invaluable tool based on the Japanese concept of ikigai is Job Crafting of Ikigai . It is an interesting exercise that helps you understand what fuels your passions and, in turn, change aspects of your role to make it more fulfilling.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others manage stress without spending hours on research and session prep, this collection contains 17 validated stress management tools for practitioners . Use them to help others identify signs of burnout and create more balance in their lives.

Job satisfaction can be a two-way street. Employees need to feel satisfied, and organizations must help employees realize their potential.

If you are interested in increasing the job satisfaction of your employees, be sure to look beyond the seemingly practical benefits of providing adequate salaries and health insurance, although those too are critical.

Motivating employees may be just as important. Job satisfaction links to motivation, which employees can gain even more of when realizing their full potential. Besides providing adequate salaries and health insurance, much more can be done by companies to motivate and guide employees. In turn, companies will reap the benefits of loyalty and shared objectives.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Work & Career Coaching Exercises for free .

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Job satisfaction and employee productivity

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The Importance Of Job Performance

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All we know that we all are in the competition world, everyone trying to get more and more knowledge to compete in the world. Everyone has their own knowledge and skills, so companies or organisations has to find a right person for right job so they can meet their targets or goals. Nowadays, organisations find it difficult to find a right person for correct jobs. So, in this essay I will explain the role of right person fit or motivated worker leads to high performance of the organisation and job satisfaction of employees as well. “Job performance= individual attributes* work effort (motivation)*organisational support” (Wood et al,2004, p96) Firstly, individual …show more content…

If an employee needs to complete a task how much employee put an energy to complete that task, what type directions the employee will take and the length of the time employee will take to attain that goal. To have good job performance one reason would be how much employee getting an organisational support. Organisational support could be providing a training sessions, new technology, good environment anything. For example: At my workplace, we have free professional development sessions and development checklist and motivated management team, all these things motivates employees to put more their efforts and better job …show more content…

Extraverted people talk first and think later and they are like to talk to many people. Introverted people are rehearsing things before saying to people and they like to having a time by themselves. I think Extraverted people more likely to be give a good performance. Sensing vs Intuitive means people’s ways prefer to gather data. Sensing people likes routines and orders, they would prefer to work with facts and figures rather and ideas where Intuitive people thinks about the things several times instead of doing things straightaway. I think Sensing people would be good because in organisation we have to make decisions instead of thinking it could be like this and that. Thinking vs Feeling means how people make decisions. Thinking type of people use reasons and logic to tackle the problem, other hand Feeling type people trying to use their feelings and emotions to solve the problem. Judging vs Perceiving means how people are face the world. Judgers are more likely to control the world, ordered and structured. Perceivers are adjust themselves in world means they are flexible and

Rational Decision Making: Objective And Effective Decision-Making

There are two ways in which people make decisions in their daily life or at work: Intuitive or rational. If we talk about intuitive decision-making (IDM) we talk about the subjective decisions that are not based on any facts and purely instinctive, for example whether or not to cross the street. These decisions are fast occurring, have no any need for reasoning and are used if facts are unavailable or making a decision is very difficult.

Myers Briggs Personality Test

Thinking is when we make careful decisions with an analysis and thought about processes. With thinking we may weight our pros and cons and make a justified decision. Feeling is when we react off our emotions. We have a battle in our mind when our feelings and thoughts don’t coincide with each other. A weakness with the personality trait of thinking is that our thinking can be altered by outside factors. We may have things that happens that affects our judgement. We have to question if we are thinking and conforming to facts or just opinions. At work I tend to think processes through so I can teach or coach someone else to develop. Before I make a speech, I tend to think it through clearly. Before recommending someone for a position, I think about the interview, and how the person is a good fit for the company or

The Cognitive Process Of Perception

According to Gibson’s 1989 book organization and management, perception is a cognitive process that is used by individuals to interpret and understand the world around it. Gibson also explained that perception is the process of how individuals give meaning to their environment or surroundings. Meaning that each individual would give a meaning or interpretation of a stimulus differently to others even though the object in question is the same. Most of the time the way a person view the situation is often more important than the situation itself, It can be concluded that the definition of perception is a process of sensing, the stimulus received by an individual through the sensory organs and then interpreted so that the person can understand and know about the stimulus the individual has received. The process of interpreting the stimulus is usually influenced by the person’s experience and individual’s learning process.

Test Analysis: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test

With this he came up with two fundamental concepts in relation to the overall test. This was in tandem with the different cognitive functions of different members (Myers I. B., 1987). He concluded that there were the ‘rational’ or judging functions and the ‘irrational’ or perceiving functions. The rational functions included the thinking and feeling aspect to it, while the irrational entailed the sensation and intuition aspect (Myers I. B., 1995). This was further subdivided into four opposite pairs with a possibility of 16 other possible psychological types. They include intuition (N), extraversion (E), judgment (J), sensing (S), feeling (F), thinking (T), introversion (I) and perception (P) (Myers I. B., 1995).

Personality And Personal Identity

Sensing over intuition which means that I believe what I can see, I use my experiences from the outside world. This is correct for me

Individual Decision Making Analysis

Human beings have to made decisions right from childhood stage but the complexity of the decisions to be made or the circumstances preceding a decision vary from simple personal decisions to being in a group making corporate decisions. Individual Decision Making involves arriving at the decision at a personal level without involving external persons or making the decision regardless of an external or group's view point. This is the common method of making decisions and it has been observed to be effective when input from external parties is not necessary or in circumstances when a person might find themselves in need of immediate decision in order to tackle a particular situation. For example a person who is driving a car needs to make decisions about what action to take as he drives along the road with regards to following the driving laws and how to respond to actions by other road users. In this situation, an individual utilizes the intuitive decision making process (Cottrell, 2009) which is based on the experience that he has gone through.

Internal And External Factors Of Job Dissatisfaction

Based off of the gratification an individual contains towards their work, job satisfaction is a key. The productivity could either be positive or negative, while the relationship between the productivity and satisfaction may not be consistent. There are multiple internal and external factors in job satisfaction that can impact the behavior of an employee and engagement over time. The way the worker’s attitude concerning their field affects the performance they perform on a daily basis. One who is satisfied with the job they do, succeeds at what they do.

The Common Sense: The Five Sense Of Perception

Perception is defined as the awareness of the world through the use of the five senses, but the concept of perception is often used to isolate one person’s point of view, so how reliable can perception be if no one person’s is exactly the same? The word perception itself is riddled with different, well, perceptions of its meaning. When some hear the word they might automatically think of it as something innately flawed, that can easily be fooled by illusions, while others may think of its usefulness when avoiding scalding a hand on a hot stove. I am here to agree with both and to argue that perception is something necessary and helpful, and something that should be scrutinized for its flaws. By looking at perception as a way of knowing in the

Intuitive Psychology Essay

The Intuitive Psychology is linked to the greater capacity exhibited by some people regarding their desires, motives, and beliefs of others, moreover being able to more accurately anticipate reactions as well as behaviours, an intuitive person is a person who has feelings or seemingly acquires knowledge about events, circumstances, or other information, mainly without ordinary sensory input or previous training.

Big Five Factor Model

Extraversion is marked by pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts enjoy eing with people, are full of energy, and often experience positive emotions. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented, individuals who are likely to say "Yes!" or "Let's go!" to opportunities for excitement. In groups they like to talk, assert themselves, and draw attention to themselves. (Beaumont 2003)

Critical analysis :Shirking Work: The War on Hooky

Today work environment company are expecting very high demand from manager and workers that they over sea about job performance to keep than motivated to do they tasks. First the manager has to meet executive level manager’s goals and productivity to keep a companies success. The test book reading stated Organization is people working together to achieve a common goals, that goals also can evaluate the issues about the absenteeism in the workforce. Manager are govern by four functions to keep a business delay functions work first Planning setting performance, second Organization to process assigning tasks, third Leading to process a arousing environment by inspiring others, four controlling to process of measuring work performance.

Sensing Intuition Essay

In fact, the test was uncannily accurate. The test was also unbiased in that the personalities were not rated as one being better than the other. I am an introvert, always have been. I have always thought that society prefers extroverts over introverts. I would have preferred the results showed positive aspects of each type. In the Sensing – Intuition category I am more sensing. Sensing-Intuition is the first pair of cognitive functions and the preference for how you prefer to be served information; through the five senses or from the subconscious (Jungian/Myers-Briggs Personality Type test. 2016).

The Importance Of Perception

The way people decide to see the world will affect where they go, and how they will make decisions. A good example of this is: someone who sees the world as a wonderful place will most likely want to travel, and experience life, but someone who sees the world as a scary place will most likely stay in the house. The reason why two people can be such opposites is because one might gear their attention to the scary things while the other decides to look at the wonderful things. How they decide to perceive those experiences or events might affect their decisions as well. So really, when looking at it, perception can make or break someone. Ultimately, perception will represent how someone chooses to see the world, and how they choose to live their

More Than A Feeling-Intuition And Insight

problems, our intuition may provide us with the answer to that problem more helpfully or accurately

The Importance Of Performance Evaluation

There are several reasons organizations initiate performance evaluations, however the standard purpose for performance evaluations is to discuss performance expectations; not only from the employers perspective but to engage in a formal collaboration where the employee and the manager are both able to provide feedback in a formal discourse. There are many different processes an organization should follow when developing its performance evaluation tool; in addition essential characteristics that must accompany an effective performance appraisal process. I will discuss in detail the intent of a performance evaluation, the process an organization should follow in using its performance evaluation tool, along with the characteristics of an effective

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Related topics.

• Personality psychology
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator