The limits of effort in understanding performance: what employees "do" and what might be done about it (original) (raw)

For years, significant research efforts have been dedicated to understanding factors that lead employees to provide or withhold job effort. Effort has been a key focus because of its hypothesized link to job performance, but the effort-performance relationship has become tenuous in the 21 st Century workplace. Growing reliance on teams and high-performance work systems, shifts to a service economy, and growth of knowledge work are among factors that potentially lessen the connection. Consequently, managers and researchers should focus on other factors to better understand and assess performance. To that end, we offer a behavioral typology of performance that stresses results rather than efforts and discuss its implications for managers and organizations.