Validation of Psychometric Properties of an Instrument Measuring Employee Job Performance: The Case of Individual Work Performance Questionnaire

Abstract

Job performance (JP) remains a topical construct in both the academic and practical literature because it offers employees several benefits and the organisation, success and competitive advantage in the turbulent business environments. Thus, using a rigorous instrument to assess JP is considered vital to generate credible results to inform strategic human resources policy decisions. Currently, among the plethora of existing instruments, the Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) appears to be the most widely used instrument. Despite the extensive interest in the IWPQ, not much is known about its psychometric properties in the Ghanaian work context. This study provides evidence of the psychometric properties (reliability and validity) of the IWPQ instrument from the Ghanaian work environment, emphasising the usefulness of this instrument in a developing African country work context. A quantitative online cross-sectional approach was employed. The IWPQ instrument was returned by 347 out of 430 participants who were conveniently recruited from a Ghanaian financial work environment. Data were explored using descriptive statistics, EFA and CFA techniques. The EFA findings demonstrated a three-factor structure for the IWPQ instrument: task performance, contextual performance and counterproductive work behaviours, respectively. Moreover, the CFA findings affirmed the internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity and fitness of the three-factor JP model, thereby supporting the construct validity of the IWPQ instrument. The findings show that the IWPQ instrument is reliable and valid within the sample, implying that practitioners and academics can use it to examine and understand employees’ JP related behaviours in the understudied institution.