Assessment of the Situational and Individual Components of Job Performance

Abstract

Abstract Deficiencies in the measures used to assess situational constraints and job perform- ance are proposed to have played a major role in the failure of prior research to confirm the theorized strength of the relation between constraints and performance. In Study I the use of assessments that avoided the deficiencies of earlier studies resulted in the perceived constraint measure explaining 69.7% of the variance in the performance measure, whereas the perceived constraint measure used in earlier research explained only 10% of the variance in the same performance measure. Study I1 showed that the individual component of performance can be measured even in the presence of such extensive perceived constraints. A surprising finding was that as perceived constraints became more severe, performance fell even faster, possibly due to some discourage- ment or learned helplessness phenomenon.