Is competency enough? Understanding job performance in an economic depression context

Abstract

Job performance has received an increased attention in the last decades. Aiming to better understand its determinants from a positive individual-orientated view, this paper’s fist objective is to investigate the interacting effect of the employee’s job competency and organizational citizenship behaviors on job performance levels of a sample of 200 Romanian employees (participation rate: 86.2%). Secondly, this research aims to analyze the interacting effect of employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors and of Employer’s organizational economic behaviors in a context of global economic depression. We used correlation analysis, prediction models, and, as tools, competency assessment checklists developed by means of the Competency Elicitation Interview (Faix et al., 1991), Robertson’s performance scales for job performance (1996, 1997), Smith’s scale for organizational citizenship behaviors (1983).

Results support the idea that job performance can be approached from a multidimensional point of view. The significance of organizational citizenship behaviors as translations of personal involvement acts into the organization was successfully established, highlighting the important role they have in relationship with job performance. As valid predictors of supervisory ratings of employees’ performance, organizational citizenship behaviors seems to have the most important predictive power with a percent of 55% of the performance's variance explained. Furthermore, job competencies alone seem to be necessary but not sufficient to predict high levels of job performance (with a predictive power of 10%). Surprisingly, the interaction effect of employees’ organizational behaviors and organizational economic behaviors of the Employer reveals an unexpected paradox in relationship with individual job performance.  Main limitations (such as those who refused to participate they didn’t had comparable demographics with those who agreed to participate) along with main findings are being discussed.

Key Words: job performance, job competency, organizational citizenship behaviors, organizational economic behaviors.