I address the relationship between time in organization (including age, job experience, organization tenure) and job performance. Main effect of time is positive according to three theoretical bases: human capital theory, attraction–selection–attr...
I address the relationship between time in organization (including age, job experience, organization tenure) and job performance. Main effect of time is positive according to three theoretical bases: human capital theory, attraction–selection–attrition (ASA) theory, and job embeddedness theory. But there are other literatures about the negative effect of time on performance and the major theoretical base is cognitive entrenchment theory.
The main hypothesis of the study was that the time variable would have a positive relationship with the performance variable, and the related hypothesis was added based on the previous study that time has a non-linear relationship with performance, not linear. Since the effect of time on performance can vary depending on the gender of the members and the task routinization, the hypotheses of the moderating variable was established, and it was also hypothesized that the attitude and knowledge accumulation of the members would mediate the path between time and performance.
To capture the exact effect of time, I conducted two kinds of studies. Study 1 is a meta-analysis about the effect of age and tenure published in Korea. For meta-analysis, a total of 272 correlation coefficients derived from 2,031 performance-related papers published in Korea were used in the analysis, and the main effect and control effect were verified. Study 2 is survey and HR data analysis about the effect of three time-variables on performance. Using the data collected from an online survey of 471 employees of a Korean manufacturer, hypothesis tests were conducted on the main and moderating effects and mediating effects between time and performance.
Hypothesis testing partially confirmed the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between time and performance, and that gender and task routinization moderated the relationship between time and performance. In Mata-analysis, it has been confirmed that age has a positive relationship with almost all performance variables (task performance, civic behavior, counterproductive behavior, and performance evaluation scores) except performance measured by objective indicators, and that tenure has a positive relationship with task performance and civic behavior. Through the analysis of corporate data, the main effects of age and tenure, the nonlinear effects, and the moderating effects of gender and task routine were significantly shown under specific conditions, and it was confirmed that the relationship between age and OCB was mediated by attitude variables and knowledge variables.
This study is the first study to explore the relationship between time variables and performance in South Korea, and it has the significance of being able to test various hypotheses from various angles by simultaneously using meta-analysis and corporate survey data. In addition, by comparing how the time-performance relationship is reflected in the context of Korea as studied in the West, the results of this study confirm the contextual aspects of Korea in which the philosophy of human resource management is shifting from seniority-based to performance-based. However, unlike the Western prior studies, there is also a limitation that not enough information was obtained for meta-analysis during the data collection process. In particular, due to the lack of research data prior to the 1997, when the economic crisis begun, and when the destruction of seniority began in earnest, it shows the limitation that it did not adequately cover the historical context of Korea, which underwent a fundamental transformation of the personnel management system. The analysis of empirical data was also limited to the manufacturing industry, and the main and moderating effects, especially the interaction between temporal variables (age, tenure, and experience) and gender, which were somewhat different from previous studies, may vary depending on the context of various industries and organizations. Therefore, further research is requested to compensate for these points.