In the world of work, there are not many constructs that are as widely acknowledged yet largely misunderstood as the notion of job performance.  It is such a large and ambiguous concept that most of us, managers, employees, and specialists alike, have our own unique definitions of what it is and what it looks like.  This has also been an issue in the field of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, where job performance has undergone more than a few conceptualizations over the years.  We have been providing performance management services for decades; we know that performance is an important topic that deserves more attention than it gets, so we are contributing an entire article to its definition.  In this article, we will provide a complete, empirically based definition of job performance (and attempt to avoid dry, jargon-rich language often used in applied research!)

What is Job Performance?

Job performance has been defined as the overall expected value from employees’ behaviors carried out over the course of a set period of time (Motowidlo, Borman, & Schmidt, 1997).  This definition, although fairly technical, includes specific ideas that are worth breaking down.

• Performance is a property of behavior, or what people do at work
• An employee’s behavior has expected value to the organization – that is, an employee’s behaviors may be distinguished in the extent to which they help or hinder the organization, and the outcomes of unique behaviors are rarely measured so their value is  expected

Performance can further be broken down into two distinct types:

• Task Performance.  These are the actions that directly transform raw materials to goods and services – they are the things that are typically included in job descriptions 
  • Examples include selling clothes, drilling holes, teaching class in a school
• Contextual Performance.  These are the behaviors that contribute to overall effectiveness through supporting the social and psychological climate where work is done 
  • Examples include:  cooperating with teammates, diffusing conflict, cleaning up the conference room (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993)

But what about results??

You might have noticed that results are not included in the definition of performance.  Results can be seen as the method through which employee behaviors actually contribute to organizational effectiveness.  Because results are so closely tied in with organizational goals, it is appealing for many to place emphasis on results when considering or evaluating employee performance.  However, results are purposely not included in this definition for strong reasons:

• Situational factors outside of the employee’s control may influence the likelihood of displaying a certain behavior (for example, lack of training and high-level support for an improved process may reduce the likelihood that an employee will follow it) and the results of that behavior (for example, economic conditions may have a stronger influence on sales than an employee’s behavior)
• Evaluating performance based on employee behaviors rather than results allows us to gain a deeper understanding of employee traits and processes that contribute to organization effectiveness
• This approach also allows us to apply psychological principles to properly manage employee performance; something that could not be done if results were the primary focus (e.g., using critical incidents to identify behaviors that are particularly effective or ineffective, then establishing performance evaluation criteria based on those behaviors)

Practical application

Understanding what job performance is can help you in a variety of ways.  By avoiding the use of results and focusing on the behaviors of your employees, you can have a positive impact on performance management in your organization in a number of ways:

• You can identify critical incidents, or detailed examples of behaviors that were associated with particularly strong or weak performance.  When enough critical incidents have been collected, they can be analyzed and used in:
  • Training (for example, to identify training needs or create realistic, job-relevant scenarios)
  • Selection (incidents can be used to identify behavioral-based interview questions and score them)
  • To learn more about the effectiveness of behavior-based interviews, read this blog.
• By not focusing as much on the results, you are treating your employees more fairly and judging their performance through their actual work behaviors.  
• Using identifiable behaviors when evaluating performance (and using your observations of their effective and ineffective behaviors during performance conversations) can increase future performance by providing employees with a clear mental model of their performance.  To learn about the factors that are necessary for feedback to lead to increased performance, read this blog.

Look ahead for future blogs in this series that will look at antecedents of performance and factors that influence performance. 

-Scontrino-Powell

Other Articles Related to Job Performance

•  Personality and Job Performance
• Does Satisfaction Matter?
  
• Organizational Support for Supervisors = Higher Performing Employees
  

References

Borman, W., & Motowidlo, S. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to include elements of contextual performance. In N. Schmitt & W. Borman (Eds.), Personnel selection in organizations (pp. 71-98). San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Motowidlo, S., Borman, W., & Schmidt, N. (1997). A theory of individual differences in task and contextual performance. Human Performance, 10, 71-83.

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Employee engagement has become an increasingly familiar topic in both organizations and research.  Leaders want to know how to best encourage and utilize their employee’s engagement, while research has strived to make this construct clear.  Engagement includes aspects of high energy and increased investment in one’s work and tasks.  Both leaders and employees enact work engagement, but leaders have the ability to enhance employee engagement through leadership behaviors. Therefore, it’s an advantage for organizations to understand the leadership behaviors that have been shown to have positive impacts on employee engagement.  The suggestions below have empirical support for their ability to foster employee engagement. 

Transformational Leadership

• Cultivate relationships. Leaders who take the time to consider their employees are able to build trust with those employees.  This increases energy, an aspect of engagement where employees feel vigor and drive in their work.
  • For example, take time to meet face to face with your employees. Understand their needs and seek feedback from your employees on how you are preforming as their leader.
• Reward followers. The major benefit is increased dedication, an aspect of engagement where employees find meaning and become invested in the company.
  • For example, break down projects into smaller segments so that employees feel like they are achieving small victories along the way. 

Workgroup cross-over

• Apply team design.  Engagement is contagious both internally to workgroups and externally to the organization as a whole.  When engaged employees interact with other employees, their approach to work can spread throughout the organization to support a culture of engagement.

Job Resources

• Provide Resources.  Leaders must focus on providing support to their employees and ensuring that their employees have the necessary resources available to them.  Increasing the resources made available to employees serves to enable engagement.   Some examples:
  • Find out what employees perceive to be their skills.  Support your employees by defining their roles clearly and allowing them to use their skills.
  • Provide the resources they need in order to not worry about if they have what it takes to succeed.

A leader seeking to affect employee engagement should pay particular attention to enhancing vigor, dedication, and absorption within employees.  As noted above, these can be enhanced through individualized consideration, cultivating employee relationships, and providing necessary job resources.

What could you accomplish with an engaged workforce?

Sources:

Bono, J. E., & Judge, T. A. (2003) Self-concordance at work: Toward understanding the motivational effects of transformational leaders. Academy of Management Journal, 48, 554-571.

Christian, M.S. & Slaughter, J.E. (2007). Work engagement: A meta-analytic review and directions for research in an emerging Area. Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, 1-6.

Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692-724.

Macey, W. H., & Schneider, B. (2008). The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 3–30.

This has been a guest blog, written by and based on a through literature review conducted by a team of Doctoral students in the field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Seattle Pacific University.  If you are interested in obtaining the full literature review, contact Mike Yoder at

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Teams are the backbone of most organizations – almost everyone who has been employed has been a member of a team at one time or another.  This article seeks to explore the conditions that are necessary for effective team performance.  Teams have a few things in common:  they have clear boundaries on membership (you’re either in the team or you’re not), team members have a shared goal or objective, and they rely on each other to accomplish it.  However, there is one very important thing that teams do not have in common:  effectiveness.  Ask yourself, When was the last time you were on a phenomenal team?  Maybe a team that failed?  What was it about you, your team, its leader, or the organizational context that made it so successful or unsuccessful?

Almost any time you put a group of people together and ask them to do something, their results and the processes they use to achieve them will be different.  Teams have enormous variability in their rates of success and failure, which is something that is just as evident to those who have been on a couple of teams as it is to the scientists and researchers that study them.  There are countless books that claim to know the secrets of successful teamwork, and while many of them have valuable insights, they are often based on the anecdotes and observations of a few stand-out teams.  There is also a world of research out there that examines factors of team performance across large samples in multiple contexts.  In one such review of decades of research, Larson & LaFasto specified conditions that are necessary for effective teamwork in that they all have significant positive relationships with effectiveness and satisfaction.  Does your team demonstrate these factors?

Conditions for Effective Teams

1. A clear and motivating goal
2. Internal processes that include:
   1. Clearly identified individual roles and responsibilities (e.g., org charts that are easily available and regularly updated)
   2. A system that promotes effective communication (e.g., sending meeting agendas out to members two days prior; encouraging all members to openly share information)
   3. A system for monitoring performance and providing specific, relevant, and direct feedback to members
3. Team members that are competent in both technical skills and interpersonal skills
4. A shared commitment towards its goals
5. A climate that promotes collaboration
6. Clear standards for excellent performance
7. Support and recognition from the organization

Try This

Create a survey and send it out to your team, using each condition as an item that your team will rate (to learn more about pulse surveys, read this blog).  Make sure you protect their identity and anonymity (e.g., create a drop-box where they can put paper surveys or use SurveyMonkey to do it online and send them the link).  For each item, ask “To what extent overall does your team have…”  The three parts of item two can each be listed as separate questions (e.g., “To what extent does your team have clearly identified individual roles and responsibilities?”).  Each item can be scored using the following four-point scale:  (1) Not at all, (2) Somewhat, (3) To a moderate extent, (4) To a great extent.

When you collect the results, calculate the average score for each of the nine items separately and use the scoring key to identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses.  Items that are scored the lowest should be given serious review by your team and effort should be taken to improve them.  This can be done in a collaborative way by asking team members to meet, brainstorm ideas for improving that area, create a clear action plan, implement and stick to it!  The great thing about teams is that they can almost always be improved.

Scoring Key:

• 0 to 1:  A clear weakness that is most likely hurting team performance… fix me! 
• 1 to 2:  A moderate concern that should be addressed in the near future – could lead to trouble if left unchecked.
• 2 to 3:  Not a weakness but not quite a strong point either.
• 3 to 4:  A clear strength that can be leveraged.  This is contributing to the performance and satisfaction of your team – good job!

If you want to save time, we have developed several team effectiveness scorecards and would be happy to share them with you.  Just drop us a line.  Happy teamwork!

Related articles on teamwork and group performance:

• Virtual Teams
• Team Cohesion and Knowledge Sharing
• Project Team Effectiveness
• Why Should Teams Debrief? 

–Scontrino-Powell

Larson, C. E., & LaFasto, F. (1989). Teamwork: What must go right/what can go wrong. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 

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The IRS Audits Itself

In response to a potential shortage of managers and technical employees at the IRS, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) recently audited the agency’s new-hire onboarding processes.  The results of this analysis highlight the need for all organizations to have a strategic process for hiring, integrating, and retaining new talent.  This article reviews the IRS process, the barriers they faced and how those barriers were overcome.  Looking at the onboarding program at the IRS might help you understand some of the challenges you face in your own organization.

What is Onboarding?

Onboarding, or organizational socialization, is the process of helping new employees gain the knowledge, skills, and acceptable behaviors they need to succeed in their new workplace (Bauer, Bodner, Erdogan, Truxillo, & Tucker, 2007).  Onboarding transforms new hires from organizational outsiders to insiders who have an understanding of the company’s culture, its people, its customers, and its processes.  Research has shown strong links between onboarding and organizational outcomes such as (Bauer et al., 2007):

• New-hire performance
• Time-to-performance (the amount of time it takes for employees to become productive)
• Turnover
• Job satisfaction
• Commitment to the organization

Onboarding at the IRS

The major goals of onboarding at the IRS are to provide a consistent and positive experience that result in decreased turnover and increased speed of transforming new hires into productive employees.  To accomplish these goals, the IRS established an onboarding program by developing a website and promoting a toolkit of industry best practices which managers were asked to follow.  Although all of the tools and best practices were easily available, the IRS struggled with implementing these practices because managers were not consistently following the new program.  Many managers relied solely on their institutional knowledge; this resulted in best practices being partially implemented or even ignored.  This ultimately led to widespread criticism of the onboarding program.  For example, TITGA found that 40% of new hires had no computer, email, or telephone available when they started work.  Also, 26% of new employees were never assigned to a senior employee for orientation.  Both practices were supposed to be implemented 100% of the time.

Lessons Learned

• Problem:   The IRS did a good job of creating a website and filling it with best practices.  However, the agency did a poor job of making it easy to implement those best practices.
• Solution:  Instead of simply listing out best practices, the IRS should have provided clear, step-by-stepon how to accomplish each item.  This could have been done using checklists, PowerPoint decks, training sessions, and templates for tracking progress.

• Problem:  The IRS is collecting feedback from new hires on the onboarding process, but has not been able to use that information to make changes and improvements to the onboarding process.
• Solution:  Put in place a well-coordinated, systematic approach to collecting feedback from every new employee.   Questionnaires could be given to each employee 6-months to 1-year after hire that address every aspect of the onboarding process.  This feedback could be used to target specific areas concern and help focus energy on changes that will have the greatest effect.  Also, open-ended questions asking new hires “If you could change one thing about the onboarding processes you’ve experienced over the past year, what would you change and why?”  Answers to this type of question provide ideas for improvement from the people closest to the process.

• Problem:  Various aspects of the onboarding program were not being applied by managers across the entire organization, leading to inconsistent experiences for new hires.
• Solution:  Instead of merely providing a list of best practices, the IRS could have created a “new-hire” checklist of onboarding items (including step-by-step guides for each) and required managers to confirm their completion.   While some may perceive it as “just another box to check off,” checklists work.  By integrating checklists with manager performance evaluations and surveys given to new hires, the IRS could have tracked the outcomes of onboarding and held managers accountable for owning the process.

The IRS onboarding program is an example of how good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes.  By learning from their mistakes, you might be able to say something not often heard – that the IRS made a positive impact on your organization!

–Scontrino-Powell

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By: Nathan Iverson, Amy Blackshire, and Robert Bullock

Virtual teams may be defined as teams composed of members who combine their efforts to achieve a common goal by working over time and distance using technology or electronic communication (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). The following recommendations for constructing and maintaining effective virtual teams are based from empirical research and put forth for organizational application.

Constructing a Virtual Team

At the onset of assembling your virtual team look for the following traits and characteristics, which have been shown to promote effective team functioning:

• Extraversion
• Action-orientation
• Supportiveness
• Self-motivation
• High diversity in job experience and perspective
• Low diversity in job level (e.g., try to avoid a team composed of middle managers, 3 front-line staff, and supervisors)

Goal Setting

After the structure of the virtual team has been developed and members have been chosen, research suggests that the following processes increase the likelihood that the team will engage in high-performance behavior:

• Set SMART Goals:  Ensure that goals are Specific (clearly defined), Measurable (including numbers or other outcomes that may be measured), Achievable (within reach), Relevant (aligned with team goals), and Time-Oriented
• Individual goals should be in alignment with the overall goals of the team (this helps increase collaboration for members that may be widely dispersed geographically)
• The team should work together in developing task strategies toward meeting goals
• Team leaders should ensure that members receive regular feedback regarding progress toward their goals

Shared Leadership

Shared leadership (or a leader who involves team members to set goals and direction) is more effective than hierarchical leadership in virtual teams.  Shared leadership does not necessarily mean no leadership – it means that leaders involve team members to set goals,  and team direction.   The ideas listed below will help promote shared leadership and increased performance and team member satisfaction:

• Discuss and develop a team vision (e.g., the ideal state of the team, goals, interpersonal factors)
• Prompt discussion and development of team processes (e.g., designing work processes, task plans, and strategies for accomplishing goals)
• Promote the open exchange of information (e.g. sharing knowledge, seeking and delivering feedback)
• Prevent conflict by continuously ensuring that roles and tasks are clear

The next time you have the opportunity to lead or participate in a virtual team, try some of these research-based best practices – they’re specific to virtual teams, they are positively related to virtual team effectiveness, and most of them cost nothing to implement!

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Featured By: compliancenadsafety.com

–Scontrino-Powell

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• What knowledge, information, or skills have I learned this week?
• How did I learn what I learned?
• Was it important – will I use it again?

You might notice that these questions focus on how learning happens and how learning can be applied to work and life. These are both important considerations when working with adult learners.

What Adult Learning Theory Tells as About Learning

Adult learning theory is an increasingly important topic for businesses, educational institutions, and researchers alike.  It has important implications for how leaders develop and employees grow.  So, what does adult learning theory tell us about employee and leadership training?

• Adult learners are practical – they need to see how training material can be applied to the work they do (or want to do)
• Adult learners learn by doing – new skills need to be practiced in relevant environments
• Adult learners get bored easily – they need a mix of lecture, discussion, exercise, practice, and reflection
• Adult learners are full of knowledge – it would be a mistake to overlook this; adults should be engaged to speak up, share thoughts, and discuss with peers

Common Outcomes of Applying Adult Learning Theory

Organizations and training specialists that take the time to understand and apply adult learning theories have a great advantage.  When we use adult learning principles to guide the development and execution of workplace training, we see strong positive results that include:

• Improved outcomes (better job performance, greater application of skills, increased self-efficacy)
• Increased engagement in learning
• Enhanced motivation (for personal development and applying learning)
• Increased application of learning on-the-job
• Increased retention of material
• Development of learning orientation by trainees

If you are involved with leadership and employee development, keep adult learning in mind. Applying these principles will ensure that your training maximize skill transference and engage employees (for a blog describing employee involvement, which leads to employee engagement, click here).  We have used these principles to revive training programs that were a “necessary evil, only to be given during new-hire orientation,” and turn them into a key driver of strategy, organizational change, and process improvement.

Examples

We leave you with a few examples of training programs that we have designed and implemented, along with the goals of each.  These examples show that adult learning theory is practical for a very wide range of applications.

1. Building specific skills (determined through training needs analysis) among employees and leadership to help achieve strategic goals
2. Developing a’ la carte training programs where employees map out their own development, which increased the viability of internal applicants for lateral or upward movement
3. Using organization-wide training programs to drive organizational change and support Lean / Continuous Process Improvement initiatives (which are aimed at engaging employees at all levels to make changes to improve systems, productivity, efficiency, and to eliminate waste)

Happy learning!

–Scontrino-Powell

Related articles on Training and Development:

• Understanding Employee Development
• Design Effective Training: A Checklist
• Professional Development for your Employees
• A Lesson in Learning

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What is Servant Leadership? 

Servant leadership is defined as a leadership style (many would call it a leadership philosophy)  that emphasizes the leader’s responsibility to the success of the organization as well as his or her moral responsibility to subordinates, customers, and other stakeholders.  Although it may seem like a new leadership style is being introduced every month, servant leadership is still quite unique from other leadership styles such as transformational, sacrificial, authoritarian, and laissez-faire leadership.  Servant leadership is best described in the short book by Max DePree, Leadership Is An Art.

How is Servant Leadership Unique?

Serving and developing others is the driving source of motivation for servant leaders:  they strive for achievement so that they are in the best position to invest in their people and their organizations. They feel intrinsic satisfaction when their employees succeed, and as such they are regular champions of certain processes such as: employee training & development, performance management, and continuous process improvement (to the extent that CPI encourages a high degree of employee involvement). To make a comparison, servant leadership is at the opposite end of the spectrum from narcissistic leadership, and has some overlap with transformational leadership.  Servant and transformational leadership lead to different outcomes and work better in different organizational contexts.  For example, researchers have found that servant leadership promotes generativity, collaboration, and well-being, while transformational leadership promotes empowerment and ability to manage organizational change.

Servant leadership is characterized by seven dimensions

1. Acting ethically
2. Showing sensitivity to others’ personal concerns
3. Putting subordinates first
4. Helping subordinates grow and succeed
5. Empowering others
6. Creating value for the community
7. Having the skills to effectively support and assist followers

Outcomes of Servant Leadership

A recent study looked at more than a hundred CEOs in technology organizations over multiple time periods.  The results of this study are quite interesting:

• Firm performance (return on assets) was predicted by the degree of servant leadership exhibited by the CEO, in that servant CEOs had higher-performing organizations.
• There was a negative relationship between CEO narcissism and servant leadership.  Narcissists were viewed as egotistical, manipulative, and exploitive in their interactions with others.

Are You a Servant Leader?

Servant leadership questionnaire items include the following items developed by Barbuto & Wheeler (2006).  Someone is adopting a servant leadership approach to the extent that she/he characterizes the behaviors listed below.  Behaviors are organized into five dimensions of servant leadership.

Altruistic calling

• This person puts my best interests ahead of his/her own.
• This person does everything he/she can to serve me.
• This person sacrifices his/her own interests to meet my needs.
• This person goes above and beyond the call of duty to meet my needs.

Emotional healing

• This person is one I would turn to if I had a personal trauma.
• This person is good at helping me with my emotional issues.
• This person is talented at helping me to heal emotionally.
• This person is one that could help me mend my hard feelings.

Wisdom

• This person seems alert to what’s happening.
• This person is good at anticipating the consequences of decisions.
• This person has great awareness of what is going on.
• This person seems in touch with what’s happening.
• This person seems to know what is going to happen.

Persuasive mapping

• This person offers compelling reasons to get me to do things.
• This person encourages me to dream “big dreams” about the organization.
• This person is very persuasive.
• This person is good at convincing me to do things.
• This person is gifted when it comes to persuading me.

Organizational stewardship

• This person believes that the organization needs to play a moral role in society.
• This person believes that our organization needs to function as a community.
• This person sees the organization for its potential to contribute to society.
• This person encourages me to have a community spirit in the workplace.
• This person is preparing the organization to make a positive difference in the future.

How do you score yourself on servant leadership?  Where were your greatest strengths? 

Related articles on leadership styles and outcomes:  

•  Understanding Employee Development
• Supervisor Support: A Key Element in Effective Leadership
• Abusive Supervision: Outcomes and Recommendations
• What Advancing Leaders Need to Know 

–Scontrino-Powell

Source:  Barbuto, J. E., & Wheeler, D. W. (2006). Scale development and construct clarification of servant leadership. Group & Organization Management, 31, 300-326. doi:10.1177/1059601106287091

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The process of change includes the following five stages:

1.  PRE-CONTEMPLATION.  In this first stage people have no desire or intention to change.  If a person in this stage is pressured to change their performance or behavior (e.g., by their boss), they might demonstrate change but will immediately go back to their old ways of doing things the second the external pressure is off.

• Helpful Actions:  At this stage, pushing an employee to change his or her behavior too much can actually cause more harm than good.  If the employee him/herself does not see the need to change, chances are that nobody else can change their mind.
• “I am a good employee and I perform well, so why would I want to sign up for the new mentoring program?” 

2.  CONTEMPLATION.  In this stage, people know where they want to go (e.g., improve some aspect of performance) but are not ready to take action.  In this stage, people seriously consider their change, weighing the advantages against the costs of time and energy.  Of the first four stages, this one can last the longest.  For example, people who make the same New Year Resolution every year take an average of 5 years to maintain the resolution for longer than 6 months! (Norcross & Vangarelli, 1989)

• Helpful Actions:  Contemplation can be triggered by events that increase a person’s awareness of their current state of performance or behavior.  Too much of a shock can have the opposite effect, so it’s important to give encouragement and describe the positive impact that the change will have in the workplace
• For example:  Rick, who leads a group of 15, was recently given 360 feedback.  What stood out were the low ratings his direct reports gave him on performance feedback.  Rick was already aware that he needed to do it and is now painfully aware that he needs to crack down and give some tough feedback to a few of his employees.  Yet, Rick avoids it because of how uncomfortable it makes him feel.  He knows he should work on this problem, but has yet to take action.  Without coaching or some external shove, he could remain stuck in this stage for years!

3.  PREPARATION.  In this stage, people are focused on the end goal and have begun taking steps towards changing their behavior or improving their performance.  Some steps are typically more effective than others in getting the individual closer to their end goal.

• Helpful Actions:  Establish a good developmental plan that combines small, doable action steps with intent to lay the groundwork for making larger changes.  This is the small wins/losses stage.
• Using the previous example:  In this stage, Rick has used his 360 feedback to create an individual development plan outlining how he will become a better leader by giving regular performance feedback to his employees.  Rick has a great executive coach, so when they created his action plan, they started with small and easy goals that were specific and measurable.  One action was to identify and write one piece of feedback, no longer than a sentence, for one of his employees at the end of every day.  Another action was to give developmental feedback to 2-3 trusted friends outside of work over the next two weeks.  Rick has done well identifying feedback, but has had trouble giving feedback to his friends.

4.  ACTION.  This stage involves modifying the behaviors or performance to acceptable levels.  In terms of a developmental plan, this stage occurs as action plans are being followed and the performance objectives are met.  Of all the stages, this one requires the greatest commitment of time and energy.

• Helpful Actions:  Social support, encouragement, recognition, immediate feedback, and having access to the necessary resources are crucial for success in this stage (to learn more about giving effective feedback, click here)
• Rick has been working through the SMART goals identified in his development plan and has finally met his objectives – to give weekly feedback to each of his employees and to follow through on giving the tough developmental feedback to the few under-performers on his team.  It has been a lot of work, but his coach has helped him define the path, while his employees and his boss have noticed his improvement.

5.  MAINTENANCE.  The final stage involves maintaining the improved performance or changed behavior.  Maintenance is not static however; it is a continuation of the change.  Part of maintenance involves ‘relapse,’ or falling back into their old ways of performing tasks or managing employees.

• Helpful Actions:  Practice, encouragement, accountability, recognition, reward, and alignment with existing performance evaluation processes all can help changes “stick.”
• Rick and his boss met to update his formal roles and responsibilities to include giving regular real-time performance feedback to employees, and he has continued to meet those expectations for the most part, but still slips into his old ways every once and a while when he is under stress (to learn more about workplace stress & burnout, click here). 

One final important note about the five stages of change is that they do not happen in a linear fashion.  Rather, progress is more spiral-shaped, as people go back and forth, succeed and fail, etc.  Employee development and performance management are inextricably tied to this process, so one of the best things we can do to encourage growth and performance improvement is to understand these five stages and provide the right kind of support at the right time.

–Scontrino-Powell

Source: Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., and Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to addictive behaviors. American Psychologist, 47, 1100-1114.

Other Related Articles:

• Professional Development for your Employees:  A Sound Investment
• Supervisor Support

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