Task Performance and Contextual Performance: The Meaning for Personnel Selection Research

Abstract This article distinguishes between task and contextual activities, and a taxonomy of contextual performance containing elements of organizational citizenship behavior and prosocial organizational behavior is offered. Evidence is presented demonstrating that supervisors weight roughly equally subordinate task and contextual performance when making overall judgments of their performance. This, along with data showing that personality successfully predicts contextual performance, provides an alternative explanation for recent meta-analytic findings that personality correlates moderately with overall performance. Personality may be predicting the contextual component of overall performance. Results from studies using the Hogan Personality Inventory confirm that correlations between personality and contextual criteria are higher than correlations between personality and overall performance. We argue that finding such links between predictors and individual criterion elements significantly advances the science of personnel selection.