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Research on Knowledge Workers’ Performance Structure and Its Influencing Factors

Author: ZhangJing
Tutor: YuJing
School: China University of Geosciences
Course: Business management
Keywords: knowledge workers performance structure organizational fit job fit structural equation model
CLC: F224
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 679
Quote: 8
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Abstract

While there have emerged numerous schools and trends of throughout the hundred-year history of management science, a research focusing on humanity has remained unchanged until nowadays and is becoming even stronger. What’s more, in the 21^st century when information and knowledge have become the driving force of most enterprises’ development, the profit core has changed from capital into knowledge and specialists. Knowledge workers as the bearers of information and knowledge, therefore, are push forward to an unprecedented significant position. The management of knowledge workers and their job performance has been regarded as the biggest challenge for the management of 21^st century.Every aspect concerning the management of knowledge workers, from the concept, characteristics, and classification of knowledge workers, through the features and quantification of knowledge work, to the performance management of knowledge workers, has drawn pervasive attention and received enthusiastic research and practice from the academic and business world. The literature home and abroad dealing with knowledge workers and their performance management is very abundant, especially those about the theories and empirical studies on the definition and characteristics of knowledge workers and on their performance influencing factors, which have laid the theoretical foundation for this paper.However, three problems have been found with the present literature in theoretical and empirical research on knowledge workers’ job performance: （1） the research on knowledge workers’ performance structure has ignored the unique characteristics of these workers, and made a direct use of the two- and three-dimensional performance structure of general workers, and therefore lacks in a new performance structure investigation from the perspective characteristic of knowledge workers; （2） there is a lack in discussion of creative and learning performance. The evaluation system under the present performance structure can not reflect the workers’ genuine value, which can lead to an unjustified evaluation on the performance. （3） the present researches have shown a bias toward single factors influencing knowledge workers’job performance, whereas there exist many factors working together, which makes the researches seem a little bit messy. This may have resulted from a lack in classification and integration of influencing factors, and from the lack of a systematic research on influencing factors from a multi-dimensional perspective.In the light of those conditions mentioned above, this paper carries out a detailed description and analysis from the definition and characteristics of knowledge workers, to the research on knowledge workers’ performance structure and its influencing factors, and designs and verifies the scientificity of the task-contextual-learning-innovative performance structure. On the basis of this four-dimensional performance structure, such factors as job fit, organizational fit, and personality fit are also taken into account, in order to build an extended model of job performance, that is, a contextual model where the job, organization, and personality fit will be ?matched with the factors in the multi-dimensional performance structure. The paper will verify the research hypothesis based on a questionnaire of 236 knowledge workers, by means of Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and Structural Equation Model. The main conclusions of this research are as following.（1） The task-contextual two-dimensional performance structure is not fit for knowledge workers. This paper arrives at a measuring scale （table） through semi-structural interviews and documentary analysis （literature review）. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the samples of 236 pieces of questionnaire lead to a satisfying result. The result shows that there exist obviously four factors concerning knowledge workers’ performance: task, contextual learning and innovative, all of which are verified.（2） There are two dimensions to knowledge workers’ organizational fit: worker-organizational feature fit and worker-organizational need fit. The organizational fit shows an obviously positive influence on task performance, and also some influence contextual performance, but no influence on innovative performance. This demonstrates that organizational fit exerts influence mainly on knowledge workers’ task and contextual performance, and it imposes an indirect influence on workers’ learning and contextual performance through the variable of personality.（3） There are also two dimensions to knowledge workers’ job fit: worker-job feature fit and worker-job need fit. The research result shows that job fit has an obviously positive influence on innovative performance, and some influence on learning performance, but no influence on task performance. This demonstrates that job fit mainly shows influence on learning and innovative performance, and just exerts some indirect influence on workers’ contextual performance through the variable of personality.The originality of this paper lies in two points. First, the research on knowledge workers and their job performance with which this paper is concerned lies in the frontier of management field. Former researches on knowledge workers performance have adopted the traditional two-dimensional structure. The research of this paper constructs a four-dimensional performance structure, whose scientificity is verified by Structural Equation Model （SEM）, by combining the characteristics of knowledge workers and their management with the latest performance theories. Second, different from the former researches which gave more emphasis on single factors, this research creates an extended performance model of knowledge workers which is tested by Path Analysis, by integrating the studies of Organizational Behavior and theories of individual character and including job fit and organizational fit as influencing factors of knowledge workers’ performance.

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