DO & CO EVENTS COMPANY

Do & Co Events Company

Do & Co Events Company

Introduction

As job performance is the most widely studied criterion variable in the organizational behavior and human resource management literatures (cf. Campbell, 1990; Heneman, 1986; Schmidt & Hunter, 1992), the construct validity of employee performance measures is critical. The convergent validity of employee performance measures is important to academics and practitioners. For academics, it is central to hypothesis test validity and theory construction, whereas practitioners are interested in accurately assessing employee performance to utilize scarce resources.

Do & Co Events Company

Although there are multiple ways to partition employee performance measures, the most popular has been between objective and subjective measures. Objective measures are defined here as direct measures of countable behaviors or outcomes, whereas subjective measures consist of supervisor ratings of employee performance. Although these categories are somewhat arbitrary, they provide a useful distinction by which previous research may be organized, synthesized, and interpreted.

Theorists who have examined objective and subjective employee performance measures have generally agreed that they should not be used interchangeably (Murphy & Cleveland, 1991). These recommendations were empirically supported by Heneman (1986), who reported a corrected mean correlation of only .27 in a meta-analysis of the relationship between subjective supervisory ratings and objective result-oriented measures. Heneman concluded that the measures were not substitutable, and that "when reviews of the literature are conducted, results should be grouped by the type of employee performance criteria" (p. 820).

In spite of these theoretical recommendations and empirical findings, many researchers continue to treat different employee performance measures synonymously. One need look at only a few studies that include employee performance to realize that many authors' conclusions are intended to generalize to a broad employee performance construct, irrespective of the measure(s). This is further seen in recent meta-analyses in which the authors did not distinguish between objective and subjective employee performance measures (e.g., Fried, 1991; Williams & Livingstone, 1994).

A few primary researchers and meta-analysts have heeded these recommendations, and have explicitly looked for differences in relationship strength between multiple independent variables with subjective and objective employee performance measures. But contrary to expectations, in practically no cases have significant relationship differences been found. For example, Nathan and Alexander (1988) found a difference between objective and subjective measures in only one of the seven relationships examined, and concluded that the objective/subjective distinction "may be more illusory than real" (p. 531). Their conclusion is corroborated by several meta-analyses. In examining the relationship between age and employee performance, McEvoy and Cascio (1989) found no difference in the strength of relationships involving productivity (objective measures) and supervisor ratings (subjective measures). Ones, Viswesvaran and Schmidt (1993) found no difference between the relationships involving production records and ratings in their examination of integrity tests and overall job employee performance. Tett, Jackson, and Rothstein (1991) failed to find objective/subjective performance measure differences in a meta-analysis examining personality as a predictor of job performance. Similarly, Mathieu and Zajac (1990) found no objective/subjective relationship strength differences in their commitment ...