Conceptualizing Performance Processes: A Model to Guide Research Linking Quality of Life and Performance

Abstract

Our overall objective in this paper is to examine the way in which experiences and conditions outside the work domain, such as marital relations, financial circumstances, community support, and social networks, affect job performance. That our lives outside the workplace spill over to influence the way we do our daily jobs may seem intuitive, but there has been very little civilian or military research conducted to support this basic intuition. In addition, the research that does exist examines the relationships between stable features of our lives, degree of conflict, for example, and general performance levels aggregated over time. Such research, we believe, is not very accurate in the way it represents the critical performance processes that play out in real time. As such, it is limited in what it can tell us about the nature of the relationship between the quality of our lives and the way we perform our jobs.