Perceived Accountability and Job-Related Factors as Alternative Sources for Contextual Performance: What Can Managers Do More to Encourage Contextual Performance?

This study was prepared to test a premise that job characteristics and managerial actions encourage employees to feel accountable for contextual performance (CP) behaviors and the perceived accountability for CP behaviors leads to the actual behaviors. Contextual performance (CP) refers to activities that differ from job-specific task performance but are still important for achieving organizational goals. Despite its importance, CP is not as clearly listed in a formal job description or explicitly included in promotion criteria as is task performance (Lepine & Dyne, 2001; Organ, 1988). And, it has been assumed to be exhibited as a matter of individual discretion (Motowidlo, Borman, & Schmit, 1997). However, organizations cannot afford to depend on chance or employees’ goodwill to provide the innovative and spontaneous activities they need (Kerr, 1975). So, the question that this study will address is, “What can managers do to encourage their subordinates to engage in CP?” This study argues that physical, psychological, and social environments created by managers can make employees feel accountable for performing CP. Specifically, five job characteristics, including task significance, task identity, autonomy, supervisor feedback, and behavioral norms, were hypothesized to have indirect positive effects on CP behaviors through perceived accountability. Those hypothetic relationships were distilled from relevant literature. In their accountability model, Dose and Klimoski (1995) suggested that when individuals perceive their jobs or actions as important and have enough control over the situation to achieve tasks, they are likely to feel accountable for their behaviors. The job characteristics literature identified task autonomy (Hackman & Oldham, 1976) as the sources of felt responsibility, which is suggested as a core component of perceived accountability (Cummings & Anton, 1990; Daft, 2002; Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, & Doherty, 1994; Schlenker & Weigold, 1989). Frink and Klimoski (1998b) suggested that accountability is subject not only to structural contingencies, such as evaluation systems, reward systems, and disciplinary procedures, but also to social contingencies, including organizational culture and behavioral norms. Finally, while both goal setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1990) and control theory (Taylor, Fisher, & Ilgen, 1984) emphasize that performance improvement requires specific goals and feedback, some characteristics of the feedback process are determinants of perceived accountability for using the information obtained from feedback sources (London et al., 1997). A data were collected from 344 supervisor-subordinate dyadic samples. A dyadic sample design was employed to minimize the effects of common method variance issue and social desirability. Since job characteristics,