Define employee performance?

You're welcome.

25/06/2026

I think you're approaching this the right way.

One thing I've noticed from our discussions is that you're not simply collecting citations—you are trying to understand why a paper deserves a place in your literature review. That will help you enormously when you eventually defend your DBA.

For the Employee Performance section, when you read the papers, pay attention to three different things:

1. Definition

Ask:

> "How does this author define employee performance?"

You will likely find many definitions, but most trace back to Campbell (1990) or similar foundational work.

2. Dimensions

Ask:

> "What aspects of performance are being measured?"

Common dimensions include:

Task performance

Contextual performance

Adaptive performance

Counterproductive work behavior

Not every study uses all four.

3. Measurement

Ask:

> "How did the researchers operationalize employee performance?"

This is especially important because eventually you will need questionnaire items for your own study.

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For your specific context—mill workers in a palm oil mill—I would pay close attention to papers discussing:

Productivity

Work quality

Safety compliance

Attendance

Adaptability

Teamwork

Problem-solving

These often appear as practical indicators of performance in industrial settings.

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Another suggestion: create a simple literature matrix as you read.

Author Definition Dimensions Industry Key Findings

Campbell (1990) Behaviour contributing to organizational goals Multiple behavioural dimensions General Seminal definition

Koopmans et al. (2011) Individual work performance Task, Contextual, Adaptive, Counterproductive General Comprehensive framework

Hermina & Yosepha (2019) Employee contribution to organizational goals Varies Management Empirical support

Do this for every major paper. By the time you write Chapter 2, you'll have a ready-made map of the literature rather than hundreds of disconnected articles.

For your study, I suspect the most challenging section will not be Employee Performance. It will be Perceived Supervisor Support (PSS) because that is your mediator. You'll need to justify:

What PSS is,

Why supervisors matter in palm oil mills,

Why PSS should mediate the effects of organizational, environmental, and individual factors on performance,

And how this aligns with Social Exchange Theory.

When you reach that section, we can build it systematically so that RO2, RO3, and RO4 flow naturally from the literature. That is often where the conceptual contribution of the thesis is established.

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