Chapter 2: Job performance:

introduction:
- Using results as the primary indicator of job performance creates potential problems:
1. Employees contribute to their organization in ways that go beyond bottom line
results,
a. as a result this method of evaluating will give you an inaccurate picture of
which employees are worth more
2. Manager’s focus on bottom line results can create a bottom line mentality among
employees.
a. Results in social undermining- sabotaging coworkers reputation or trying
to make them look bad.
3. Results are often influenced by factors that are beyond the employee's control
a. Product quality
b. Competition
c. Equipment
d. Technology
e. Budget constraints
4. Results don't tell you how to reverse a “bad year”
a. They do not provide people with the information they need to improve
their behaviour.

What is job performance?

Job performance:
- Is formally defined as the value of the set of employee behaviours that contribute, either
positively or negatively, to organizational goal accomplishments.
- Includes behaviours within the control of employees
- Akso puts boundaries on behaviors that are ( and are not) relevant to job
performance.

Behaviours generally fit into three broad categories:

- Task performance (good)
- Citizenship behaviour (good)
- Counterproductive behaviour. (bad)

What is task performance?

Task performance:
- Includes behaviours that are directly involved in the transformation of organizational
resources into the goods/services that the organization produces.
- Task performance is the set of explicit obligations that an employee must fulfil to
receive compensation and continued employment.
Routine task performance:
- Involves well known responses to demands that occur in a normal, routine, or otherwise
predictable way.

Adaptive task performance:

- Involves employees' response to task demands that are novel, unusual, or at the very
least, unpredictable.

Creative task performance:

- Degree to which individuals develop ideas or physical outcomes that are both novel and
useful.

How do organizations identify the behaviours that underlie task performance?

Job analysis:
- A process by which an organization determines requirements of specific jobs.

How to conduct job analysis:

1. List of all the activities involved in the job is generated.
a. Draws on data from several sources, including observations, surveys, and
interviews of employees.
2. Each activity is rated by “subject matter experts” according to things like importance and
frequency of the activity
3. The activities rated highly in terms of their importance and frequency are retained and
used to define task performance.
a. Those retained behaviours usually find their way into training programs as
learning objectives.

National occupational classification (NOC)

- Primary reference on occupations in canada that organizes over 40,000 job titles into
500 occupational group descriptions.
- While these databases are descriptive in a general sort of way, they cannot
capture unique task requirements and the “numerous small decisions” that
distinguish the most effective organizations from their competitors.

What is citizenship behaviour?

Citizenship behaviour:
- Voluntary employee behaviours that contribute to organizational goals by improving the
context in which work takes place.
Interpersonal citizenship behaviour:
- Benefits coworkers and colleagues and involves assisting, supporting, and developing
other organizational members in a way that goes beyond normal job expectations.
- Helping:
- Assisting coworkers who have heavy workloads
- aiding them with personal matters
- Showing new employees the ropes.
- Courtesy
- Refers to keeping coworkers informed about matters that are relevant to
them
- Sportsmanship
- Involves maintaining good attitude with co workers even when they've
done something annoying or the unit is going through tough times

Organizational citizenship behaviour:

- Supporting and defending the company, working to improve its operations, amnd being
especially loyal to it.
- Voice
- involves speaking up and offering constructive suggestions for change.
- Civic virtue:
- Refers to participating in the company's operations at a deeper than
normal level by attending voluntary meetings and functions, reading and
keeping up with organizational announcements.
- Boosterism:
- Means representing the organisation in a positive way when out in public,
away from office and away from work.

What Is Counterproductive behaviour?

Counter productive behaviour:
- Defined as employee behaviour that “intentionally hinder organizational goal
accomplishment.
Property deviance:
- Refers to behaviours that harm the organization’s assets and possessions.
- Sabotage: represent the intentional destruction of physical equipment,
organizational processes, or company products
- Theft

Production deviance:
- Directed against the organization but focuses specifically on reducing the efficiency of
work output.
- Wasting resources: employees use too many materials or too much time to do
too little work.
- Substance abuse:
- If employees abuse drugs or alcohol while on the job or shortly before
coming to work, the efficiency of their production will be compromised
because their work will be done more slowly and less accurately.

Political deviance:
- Refers to the behaviours that intentionally disadvantage other individuals rather than the
larger organization.
- Gossiping: casual conversations about other people in which the facts are noy
confirmed or true.
- Incivility: represents communication that is rude, impolite, discourteous, and
lacking good manners
- Personal aggressions: hostile verbal and physical actions directed toward other
employees
- Harassment: falls under personal aggression and occurs when
employees are subjected to unwanted physical contact or verbal remarks
from a colleague
 - Abuse: falls under personal aggression. Occurs when an employee is
assaulted or endangered in such a way that physical and psychological
injuries may occur.

What does it mean to be a “good performer”?

- Employees are good at particular job tasks that fall within their job description
- Whether routine or require adaptability or creativity
- Employees engage in citizenship behaviour
- Directed at both co-workers and the larger organization
- They refrain from engaging in the counterproductive behaviours that can badly damaged
the climate of an organization

How can organizations use job performance to manage employee performance?

- Job performance information is used to manage employee performance.
- Four of the most representative practices:
 - Management by objectives
- Behaviourally anchored rating scales,
- 360 degree feedback
- Forced ranking.

Management by objectives:
- Management by objectives (MBO)
- Is management philosophy that bases an employee's evaluation on whether the
employee achieves specific performance goals.

How does it work?

- Typically an employee meets with his or her manager to develop a set of mutually
agreed upon objectives that are measurable and specific
- They also agree on time period to achieve those goals
- And the methods used to do so.

Behaviourally anchored rating scales:

- Behaviourally anchored rating scales (BARS)
- Measure performance by directly asserting job performance behaviours

How does it work?

- Uses “critical incidents” - short descriptions of effective and ineffective behaviours - to
create a measure that can be used to evaluate employee performance.

- Supervisors rate several performance dimensions using BARS and score an employee’s
overall job performance by taking the average value across all the dimensions.

360-Degree Feedback
- 36-Degree feedback:
- Involves collecting performance information not just from the supervisor but from
anyone else who might have first hand knowledge about the employee's
performance behaviours.
- Co workers
- Subordinates
 - Customers
- The employee is him or herself.
- With the exception of the supervisor’s ratings

- Employees can develop a better sense of how their performance may be deficient in the
eyes of others and exactly where they need to focus their energies to improve.

Potential problems:
- Which source is more correct?
- Raters may give biased evaluations if they believe the information will be used for
compensation, as opposed to just skill development.

Forced ranking:
- Created by jack welch
- Using a “vitality curve” managers are forced to rank each of their people into one of three
categories:
- Top 20% (A players)
- Thought to possess “the four Es of GE leadership:
- High levels of Energy
- Ability to Energize others around common goals
- Edge to make tough yes and no decisions
- Ability to consistently Execute and deliver on their promises.
- Vital middle 70% (B players)
- Backbone of the company but lack the passion of As
- Bottom 10% (C players)
- Are those who cannot get the job done and are let go

Potential problems:
 - The system is inherently unfair because it forces managers to give bad evaluations to
employees who may be good performers, just to reach a pre-established percentage.
- Employees may become competitive with one another to avoid finding themselves in a
lower category.

- As a result organizations today (including GE) have moved away from performance
management systems that rely upon forced ranking of employees.

Social networking systems:

- Facebook-styles program called “performance Multiplier” which requires that
employees post and update weekly and quarterly goals.
- Managers then monitor the information and provide feedback.

- Rypple uses a TWitter-like program to enable employees to post questions about their
own performance so that other employees can give them anonymous feedback.

Employee behaviours relevant to job performance include:

- Task performance
- Counterproductive behaviors
- Citizenship behaviours