PSYCH 647 Week 1 Defining Job Performance and Its Dimensions Example

What Should a Field Technician Be Rated On? Defining Performance Dimensions for a Water Utility's New Appraisal System

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/647: Human Performance, Assessment, and Feedback

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The water utility, its jobs and the rating history are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Organizations often rush to measure performance before agreeing on what it is. Rating forms built on vague labels produce ratings that are unreliable and unfair. This paper defines performance for field technicians at a water utility, drawing on research models and the job itself.

The Old Form

The Mesa del Sol Water Authority serves about 280,000 people in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and employs 140 field technicians who maintain pipes, valves, hydrants and meters, respond to main breaks and test water quality. For twenty years, supervisors rated technicians once a year on a form with eight items, including "attitude," "dependability," "initiative" and "quality of work," each on a five-point scale with no descriptions. Ratings clustered at four, and technicians in a recent survey said the form told them nothing about how to improve. A union grievance argued that one technician's low attitude rating reflected a personal conflict with his supervisor.

What Technicians Actually Do

I gathered information through ride-alongs with six crews, interviews with twelve technicians and four supervisors and a review of work orders and incident reports. Technicians repair main breaks, often at night and in traffic, which requires excavating, shoring trenches, isolating valves and restoring service; replace and read meters; flush hydrants and collect water samples for testing; locate and mark lines for contractors; respond to customer complaints about pressure, leaks and water quality; and keep vehicles, tools and records in order. Supervisors described excellent technicians as those who diagnosed problems accurately, worked safely in trenches, explained situations patiently to worried residents and helped newer crew members.

Performance as Behavior

Campbell and Wiernik (2015) reviewed decades of work on modeling job performance and argued that performance should be defined as things people do, actions and behaviors that are relevant to the organization's goals and can be scaled in terms of proficiency, rather than as the outcomes of those actions. Outcomes such as the number of main breaks fixed in a month depend partly on factors outside an individual's control, such as pipe age, weather and how many breaks occur. The authors described a model with several substantive factors, including technical performance, communication, initiative and effort, counterproductive behavior, supervisory and leadership behavior, management performance and peer and team leadership.

Applying this view, I removed trait labels such as attitude and dependability and focused on what technicians do.

Proficiency, Adaptivity and Proactivity

Griffin et al. (2007) proposed a model of work role performance that crosses three forms of behavior, proficiency, meeting the requirements of a role; adaptivity, coping with and supporting change; and proactivity, self-starting actions that change the situation, with three levels of contribution: to one's individual tasks, to one's team and to the organization. In their studies, uncertainty and interdependence in work contexts determined which forms mattered most. Proficiency was most important when roles were predictable; adaptivity and proactivity mattered more when work was uncertain.

Water utility work combines predictable tasks, such as meter reading, with highly uncertain ones, such as main breaks at two in the morning where pipe conditions are unknown. Proficiency matters everywhere, but adaptivity and proactivity, such as noticing a weakening valve before it fails, matter during emergencies and when the utility adopts new technology, as it is now doing with automated meters.

A technician cannot control how many mains break in her district; she can control how safely and skillfully she repairs them.

Helping and Harming

Two further kinds of behavior shape a crew's work. Citizenship behavior includes helping coworkers, volunteering for difficult tasks and supporting the organization. On the harmful side sit acts that damage the utility or coworkers on purpose: padding a timesheet, taking a district truck home for errands or skipping trench shoring to finish early.

Dalal (2005) meta-analyzed studies of the relationship between citizenship and counterproductive behavior and found a modest negative correlation: people who engaged in more citizenship tended to engage in less counterproductive behavior, but the two were distinct constructs rather than opposite ends of one dimension. They also had somewhat different correlates. This finding supports rating them separately rather than assuming that a helpful technician never cuts corners.

Why Traits Fail as Dimensions

Trait labels such as attitude, dependability and initiative feel natural to supervisors because people describe one another in those terms. As rating dimensions, they cause three problems. First, they invite raters to judge personality rather than work, which opens the door to bias against people whose style differs from the rater's. Second, they give employees no guidance: a technician told his attitude is a three does not know what to change. Third, they are hard to defend when challenged, because the rating rests on an impression rather than on documented behavior. The grievance over one technician's attitude rating illustrated all three problems at once.

Dimensions Differ by Role

Not every job at the utility needs the same dimensions. Customer service representatives, for example, rarely face the physical hazards that make safety central for field technicians, while their communication dimension carries much more weight. Supervisors add leadership behaviors such as coaching and scheduling. The framework is shared, but each role's dimensions and examples are written from that role's job analysis, so that a technician is never rated on a standard designed for an office job.

The Draft Dimensions

I drafted six dimensions, each with behavioral examples. Technical proficiency: diagnoses problems accurately, completes repairs to standard, documents work orders completely. Safety: sets up traffic control and trench shoring correctly every time, uses protective equipment, stops work when conditions are unsafe. Customer communication: explains service interruptions clearly, responds to complaints respectfully, follows up as promised. Adaptivity: adjusts plans when conditions at a site differ from expectations and learns new systems such as automated meters. Proactivity: reports and addresses developing problems, suggests improvements in procedures. Teamwork and citizenship: helps crew members, shares knowledge with newer technicians, covers emergency shifts. A separate section records counterproductive incidents, documented when they occur rather than rated annually.

Behaviors Versus Results

Results still matter to the utility, such as average repair time and customer complaint resolution, but they will be tracked at the crew and district level and used as context, not as individual ratings. This prevents technicians in districts with old pipes from being penalized for conditions outside their control.

Checking the Dimensions

I reviewed the draft with a panel of four technicians, two supervisors and a union representative. They added an example to safety, "checks for gas and electrical lines before digging," and suggested combining adaptivity and proactivity, which I declined because the research suggests they are distinct and both matter here.

The revised draft will go to all technicians for comment before it is final, since people judged by a standard should help shape it.

Conclusion

Defining performance as behavior relevant to the utility's goals, organized into dimensions drawn from research and from the job, replaces vague trait labels with standards technicians can understand and supervisors can observe. These dimensions will guide the measurement methods developed in the coming weeks.

References

Campbell, J. P., & Wiernik, B. M. (2015). The modeling and assessment of work performance. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, 47-74. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111427

Dalal, R. S. (2005). A meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(6), 1241-1255. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.6.1241

Griffin, M. A., Neal, A., & Parker, S. K. (2007). A new model of work role performance: Positive behavior in uncertain and interdependent contexts. Academy of Management Journal, 50(2), 327-347. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.24634438