The Relative Importance of Employee Engagement, Other Job Attitudes, and Trait Affect as Predictors of Job Performance

Abstract

We used univariate and multivariate relative weight analysis to assess the relative importance of a new job attitude (employee engagement), several longstanding job attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, perceived organizational support, and work centrality), and trait positive and negative affect as predictors of 3 important components of overall employee performance: task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and counterproductive (or deviant) work behavior. The results indicate that the best predictors of overall employee performance were trait negative affect, employee engagement, and job satisfaction. Moreover, the results were unaffected by the removal of a few behavioral items (akin to OCB) from measures of employee engagement. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.