TASK-PERFORMANCE AND CONTEXTUAL PERFORMANCE - THE MEANING FOR PERSONNEL-SELECTION RESEARCH

This article distinguishes between task and contextual activities, and a taxonomy of contextual performance containing elements of organizat ional citizenship behavior and prosocial organizational behavior is of fered. Evidence is presented demonstrating that supervisors weight rou ghly equally subordinate task and contextual performance when making o verall judgments of their performance. This, along with data showing t hat personality successfully predicts contextual performance, provides an alternative explanation for recent meta-analytic findings that per sonality correlates moderately with overall performance. Personality m ay be predicting the contextual component of overall performance. Resu lts from studies using the Hogan Personality Inventory confirm that co rrelations between personality and contextual criteria are higher than correlations between personality and overall performance. We argue th at finding such links between predictors and individual criterion elem ents significantly advances the science of personnel selection.