Behavior, Performance, and Effectiveness in the Twenty-first Century

Sometime during the 1980s, industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology stopped merely complaining about the "criterion problem" and began thinking about occupational or work role performance as a construct that could be substantively modeled. Subsequently, there has been considerable theory and research dealing with the substantive latent structure of performance, performance dynamics, and performance measurement issues. This chapter reviews these developments and argues that, despite differences in terminology and points of emphasis, there is virtually complete convergence concerning the principal components of job performance. The convergent picture is described, along with its implication for theory and research in I/O psychology. Finally, and somewhat unexpectedly, it is argued that at a particular level of generality/specificity the substantive structure of individual work performance is invariant, regardless of occupation, organizational level, situational context, or performance dynamics.