Abstract
This study examined the bibliometric indicators of employee job performance articles published between 2013 and 2023, which were taken from the Web of Science database, and specifically aimed to explore the trends and themes of job performance research, the characteristics of authors, publications, nations and institutions, and the particular authorship partnerships and references that are frequently cited in the field of employee performance. The research performed descriptive and bibliometric analyses using the R-Studio data analysis tool, with 983 full-text articles selected based on their relevance to the study subject. The study finds that there has been a dramatic increase in interest in employees’ job performance studies, growing authorial collaborations, country collaborations, citations, and co-citations, though most of these research activities are dominated by researchers from fewer countries, such as China, the USA, and Korea. And, according to the result, it is evident that the majority of highly cited papers in the field originate from the United States and China; in contrast, the citation rates of publications from other countries are notably lower. This present research is expected to contribute to the expanding body of knowledge and practice on employees’ job performance, enable the discovery of new trends in this area, and identify for the scientific community the main research directions that have been explored.
Introduction
The most valuable asset for a business always rest with its manpower which may determine the overall performance, make or break the company’s reputation, and affect productivity, positively or negatively. When it comes to the majority of crucial jobs, customer satisfaction, and the quality of the products and services, employees’ typically take the biggest risks (Asad Khan et al., 2019). Conceptualized as a record of the outcomes attained for each work activity over a certain time period (Saeed & Asghar, 2012), employee performance is one of the most essential parts of worker management that defines the success of an organization. In this context, a nice work environment for employees is critical if the industry wants to maintain high production, as the employees’ satisfaction influences work performance (Mathews & Khann, 2016).
The research by Maley et al. (2021) stated that after looking at the various approaches of performance management designs, their potential and trends, contend that future studies should provide a wider perspective and, specifically, researchers on employees’ job performance management need to extend the scope of discussion with regard to the future of performance evaluation. Borgogni et al. (2010) argues that there is a strong positive association between employee job satisfaction and work performance. On the other hand, Fan et al. (2022) carried out a meta-analytic examination and revealed that there is a positive relationship between public service motivation and individual job performance.
Other theories and research findings showed that employee performance determines organizational performance and job performance is influenced by a variety of variables. So, in order for any organization to get the intended results, it is recommended that they should encourage and monitor their employees’ performance, which, in turn, deserves more and more research insights. The present bibliometric analysis was carried out because it is crucial to understanding the literature’s progression from conceptual uncertainty to theory evaluation, to clarify the key constructs and their connections, and to track the evolution of the literature, which takes into account the number of scholarly collaborations that form research communities to produce and share information. As a result, it’s crucial to recognize that the expansion of interdisciplinary collaboration among academics gives future scholars a solid understanding of job performance. As the knowledge the researchers and have stated in various previous studies, including Thanuja Rathnaweera and Jayatilake (2020), there has been a gap in employee job performance studies in the past to provide enough direction for new researchers or policy-makers, which may distinguish our research by discovering, collecting, and assessing current studies and highlighting trending topics on employee job performance.
The following are the research objectives for this study:
(1) Identify trends and themes employee job performance studies.
(2) To explore the research growth of the topic, characteristics of the authors and articles, influential countries and institutions with regard to employees’ job performance.
(3) Analyze the specific authorship partnerships and references that are most cited in the field as well as evaluate the current literature and forward possible suggestions for future research.
Literature Review
Employee Performance
The most significant and valuable resource that an organization has is its workforce, whose effectiveness is essential to accomplishing the company’s objectives. The critical role of individuals working inside an organization has been highlighted by the realization that the business’s goals cannot be realized without those working within the organization. Because no goods or services can be produced or delivered without employees, employees are an organization’s most important resource. An employee job performance, like any other system, suffers when its components do not function properly. Thus, improving the attainment of the business’s strategic goals necessitates an extensive knowledge of the relationship between the workforce and the organization. According to many investigations, organizational productivity levels increase when employees believe that their managers care about their professional development.
Although earlier research has looked at the impact of job insecurity on employee perceptions, attitudes, and actions, the literature has paid insufficient attention to the impact of job insecurity on organizational performance and the underlying processes that underpin this relationship. Organizational performance is one of the most important outcomes in an organization, and studies are needed to explore the effect of job insecurity on organizational performance as well as its intermediating processes (Kim, 2020). According to Herzberg’s two-factor theory, several variables affect employee performance, and satisfied workers perform at their best, whilst dissatisfied employees’ do the opposite. Employees’ are satisfied because they are acknowledged and appreciated, have opportunities for progress, and are adequately compensated. As a result, the issue of employee performance needs rigorous management and investigation (Amarasinghe, 2015). High-Performance Work Practices and employee morale are linked to turnover intention, which not only confirms the role of employee morale in High-Performance Work Practices but also recognizes the critical role of employee morale as a mediator between their relationships (Obeng et al., 2021). Bratton and Gold (2015) states that employee job performance is influenced by a number of variables, including the organization’s performance evaluation system, the working environment, and motivating elements to succeed at work and outperform rivals in the market.
Globally, a firm’s performance is decided and based on the well-being of its employees. Companies are expected to design their pay systems and policies with employee interests on mind so that workers can meet their needs and, eventually, assist the firm to achieve its objectives. The firm must make performance feedback effective in order to drive employees to perform better and give them a sense of belonging, allowing them to stay with the company for a longer period of time (Khan et al, 2024). Job performance is divided into three categories: task performance, contextual performance, and counter-productive work behavior. The behavior that contribute to the creation and delivery of a thing or service are referred to as task performance. Completing job tasks, keeping information up to date, working precisely and cleanly, planning and organizing, and problem-solving are all important task-performance indicators. Contextual performance, also known as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), is the second component of employee performance. It is a conduct that adds to the organization’s aims. The social and psychological environment is the behavioral contribution. The third component is counter-productive work conduct, which is voluntary activity that might affect the organization’s well-being and includes, among other things, off-task behavior, whining, completing duties wrong on purpose, and misusing privileges. These aberrant actions have detrimental personal and organizational effects (Ramos-Villagrasa et al., 2019).
According to Asif and Rathore’s (2021) research findings, leadership capacity, management behavior toward employees, and the integration of commitment-based human resource management practices that build long-term commitment in which employees feel obligated toward their organizations, all play a significant role in improving the performance of public-sector organizations, which in turn helps to improve the performance of the government.
Individual Work Performance (IWP) is a tool for measuring the three aspects of employee performance, which assess mainly task performance, contextual performance, and counter-productive work behavior in a systematic manner (Koopmans et al., 2014). Future studies are advised to better understand why team and individual job performance is impacted differently by the relationship between horizontal and vertical trust (Hughes et al., 2018). Based on Khalid’s (2020) study, commitment positively mediates the relationship between pay satisfaction and manager-rated job performance, whereas pay satisfaction has an indirect positive relationship with job performance through continuance and affective commitment, which is stronger in faculty with high managerial support. According to Singh et al. (2016), a company has little or no control over a complex set of internal and external factors that affect its organizational performance. Gaur and Kumar (2009) stated that business performance is correlated favorably with the level of internationalization. Udin et al. (2022) found that work ethics were positively and significantly connected with emotional commitment and employee performance. Affective commitment additionally exhibited a good and significant relationship with employee performance.
International Collaboration
In order to enhance knowledge and encourage beneficial changes in practice, international collaborative research entails cross-national teams that share research interests, conduct research, and disseminate research findings. A rigorous cross-national study can assist a specific research subject in numerous ways, including a greater effect and wider applicability. International research, in particular, may facilitate application of research findings to other people, areas, and cultures. Internationally collaborative research also provide a transnational academic platform for collaborations that benefit participating scholars, innovate solutions to world issues, and foster the synergy that encourages people to work together and accomplish more than they could individually. These encounters between scientists and participants from many cultures and countries can develop an environment that is conducive to problem-solving and the generation of ideas that would not otherwise be possible (Buwen Yao, 2021). International collaboration is becoming more common in academic research, as most research projects are too large and complex for any single researcher or team to complete on their own. Researchers may pool their resources and abilities by collaborating with colleagues from around the world to move these projects forward more quickly. Citations are crucial for international collaboration since they acknowledge the contributions of other academics. Citations also ensure that all contributors’ work is accessible to and suitably acknowledged by the academic community. The quantity and quality of academic research articles have benefited from the growing trend towards international collaboration (Alamah et al., 2023).
Research initiatives involving the active participation of scientists whose primary institutional affiliations are in different nations are referred to as international research collaborations. These international projects all share a common research process that spans national boundaries, despite the fact that their scopes may vary significantly. Each time, multi-national teams work together to plan, conduct, and present empirical research in a subject of shared interest (Bonnie & Mehrotra, 2015). In order to stimulate cross-border research cooperation for mutually beneficial outcomes at individual and institutional levels, it has become clear that imbalances between institutional settings must be addressed more systematically (Sun & Cao, 2021). Over time, a rise in local research collaborations has offset a minor decline in the share of overseas collaborations. For instance, Vietnam’s scientific output was growing at a pace of 17% per year, and rather than being solely domestically produced, foreign partnerships were responsible for three-quarters of the growth. Furthermore, articles with foreign co-authors averaged twice as many citations as those with domestic co-authors. One interesting finding was that publications with an international corresponding author had more citations than those with a domestic corresponding author (Nguyen et al., 2017)
Research Methods
Why Bibliometric Analysis?
According to Barth et al. (2014), the bibliometric method is being utilized more frequently to offer data about the interactions between various scientific groups. The major justifications for performing this type of bibliometric study can come from various factors, and many scientific fields are interested in obtaining an overview of the literature and statistically relevant data; however, it is rarely utilized in conjunction with a bibliography of the subject matter. The literature reviews have been developed by scholars who are knowledgeable in their domains, and the reports are based on practical and theoretical experience. These publications are intended for audiences working on relevant scientific subjects. The bibliometric approaches are commonly used by information and other professionals with specialized knowledge. Researchers who study these sorts of analyses become aware of new patterns, rival groups, and potential collaborations. In all circumstances, one can benefit from bibliometric methods of analysis. Institutional or governmental agencies increasingly demand productivity reports or quality assessments of staff performance. In all cases, one may use bibliometric methods to their advantage.
In particular, in the scientific and applied domains, bibliometric approaches, or “analysis,” are now firmly established as scientific specializations and are a crucial component of research evaluation methodology. These methodologies are increasingly being used in research in many academic areas, as well as in college and university rankings throughout the world. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of articles using bibliometric analysis as a tool for scientific research. Several things could be the cause of this: To elicit a bibliometric investigation, a sufficient number of publications must be published in a field, and the techniques available to handle big data sets are now frequently used. These kinds of studies are expected to become more in demand in the evaluation of research and production among various scientific groups, policy-makers, and funding organizations. It appears that bibliometric analysis is valued as a tool for assessing the quality of scientific output, and its influence is growing (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015).
In order to conduct an analysis based on citation data that allows for the comparison of several groups, Kaur et al. (2012) claim that bibliometric or similar normalization processes are crucial. Alternative metrics have been put out as a way to balance out variations in field sizes, publications, and citation patterns. When bibliometric techniques are used to analyze data from many fields, these normalized metrics may help the field as a whole gain even more credibility. Bibliometric approaches may be used to improve the study of research trends, productivity in various industries, and scientific connection patterns in an ever-increasing quantity of articles and reports.
The Current Study
The goals of this research are to assess research trends, authorial behaviors, country characteristics, citation impact and manuscripts dealing with employee job performance in public and private enterprises, as well as to investigate research trends in the field. It also investigates where, when, who, and how these studies are carried out. The approach used was the quantitative method. By using the data from previous publications, a bibliometric analysis of 983 English-language research articles from the Web of Science database that were published between 2013 and 2023 was conducted, which makes it possible to gain insights into science mapping and present performance analysis of employee job performance studies. As the oldest, most widely used and reliable database of research articles and citations, the Web of Science provides extensive source citations along with a significant volume of previously published scientific information. The other reason is that the majority of the papers may have been published in a journal that is indexed by one service or by both with others; however, we have selected Clarivate as the data source for this analysis because it is the first database, with simple accessibility for the researchers through good reputation, and it seems to be more thorough and strict in its indexing of journals to offer high-quality articles.
Moreover, the Web of Science (WoS) is considered by scholars to be one of the best academic databases for evaluating research contributions, which has data from over 79,000,000 articles, including information from over 33,000 journals, and users typically anticipate that the content in WoS will meet the highest standards. This database was selected because it covers a wide range of educational-related topics and is regarded as a renowned database that houses articles from the Journal Citation Reports (Zhu & Liu, 2020). This database, which is regularly updated, is a reliable resource for quickly and conveniently locating academic material from around the world. Only research articles were chosen as a document type for the investigation.
The R-studio program was then used to process the list and produce a document with the required networking structure and format. It is an open-source software used to build and maintain bibliometric networks. This data analysis software was chosen because it is an effective tool for bibliometric analysis, and this tool provides detailed instructions for importing and evaluating bibliographic data, creating citation networks, and computing metrics like h-index and citation counts. With R and its extensive library of tools, performing bibliometric analysis is now easier and more efficient. A mapping representation of the bibliographic data was made and utilized to generate co-occurrence networks to better comprehend and gain deeper insights into the bibliometric results of the study topics (Figure 1). The second stage of the study technique involved a bibliometric analysis once the pertinent materials had first been extracted and examined. To conduct the search and classify the relevant articles, three separate search string classes, employee performance, job performance, and employee work performance, were used in the web search.
Research methodology and PRISMA flow diagram.
Data Analysis and Findings
Following the identification of 992 records in the Web of Science database, 983 full-text articles were screened, and nine articles were excluded based on their relevance to the study subject. Using this bibliographical data from the WOS database, we analyzed distinct patterns in publications on employee job performance. Finally, the bibliometric analysis of this research was carried out using the R-Studio statistical data analysis tool. The statistical analysis of the selected papers is presented in detail, including subsections on the number of publications by year, journal, publishing country, author institutions, author contributions, and citations.
Research Trends and Characteristics
The above Table 1’s result shows that the timespan for this bibliometric data was from 2013 to 2023, and the articles were generated from 314 different sources (Journals) in the Web of Science database. From the sources, 983 directly related articles to the topic were identified/screened and used for further analysis of the study, with a total of 43,987 references found in these included articles. The average citation rate of these documents is 22.7, which means it is a good citation rate per document, the authors used 2,525 keywords for their articles and the total number of authors for the above documents is 2,530 but from these, only 67 of them were authors of single-authored articles, this shows that most of the articles are authored in collaboration with other researchers instead of writing alone. In addition, the authors of single-authored documents are 60, the average number of co-authors per document is 3.29, and the international co-authorships from the overall co-authorship are 39.17%, which means most of the documents were authored in collaboration, but most (60.83) of them did their articles with domestic co-authors.
Descriptive Analysis of the Data.
Employee Job Performance Themes and Bibliometric Aspects
Keyword Analysis
To give insights about the study, the list of keywords and most frequently stated words in the titles and researched in the employee job performance research are included in our collection and were also identified and ranked as stated in the above figures. As shown in Figures 2 and 3, from the top 15 keywords in the studies that are included in this bibliometric analysis, the top keyword is “employee performance” (421 times), the second one is “performance” (148 times), followed by the word “job” (84 times) as the third top-ranked word, which means the top three keywords are directly related to the study topic. When we see the rest of the top keywords, their rank seems like the following 4 to 15 respectively; employee performance (61 times), job satisfaction (54 times), work engagement (39 times), task performance (38 times), self-efficacy (28 times), transformational leadership (26 times), COVID-19 (24 times), leadership (22 times), personality (19), satisfaction (19), affective commitment (18), and organization (18). Generally speaking, the top keywords in the selected articles for this bibliometric analysis are directly connected to the study’s topic.
Keyword analysis for most relevant words.
The most relevant words tree.
The above Co-occurrence network diagram demonstrates the most relevant keywords, which are studied together in every single research publication. So, based on Figure 4, the most frequently occurring keywords are around the center of the diagram, and the top keyword, which occurred with many variables in each single study, is Job Performance, which is the main variable of this study. The other top-occurring keywords are: Performance, Employee Performance, Job, Organizations, Contextual Performance, China, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Task Performance, employee Commitment, Organizational Performance, self-efficacy, Organizational Justice, Corporate Social Responsibility, and organizational citizenship. The other words shown in the figure appear together in many publications as keywords. From this understanding, we can conclude that employee job performance is the most influential word to be researched and has a direct or indirect relationship with many variables in different organizations and every profession. As we know, employee job performance is the concern of any entity, whether it is a business, public, NGO, or private and non-profit organization.
Co-occurrence network of keywords.
The Features of Authors, Articles, Countries, and Institutions
The Most Influential Countries
The researchers explored the top 20 influential countries of corresponding authors to see which articles were conducted in which region relating to the specified study topic. Evidence from Figure 5 proves that the most corresponding authors were from China with more than 250 documents, followed by the USA with more than 150 documents, and third by Korea with above 50 papers, and the majority of these articles for both countries were single-country publications rather than multiple-country publications. Following the above, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and Australia occupied the next ranks, respectively (the other countries followed based on their respective ranks). From these countries authors, all countries publications are mostly single-country publications, but in contrast, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia’s authorship was mainly dominated by multiple-country publications. The same is true in Figure 6, which shows that the top-three author countries are China, the USA, and Korea. Also, the top sources are Frontiers in Psychology, Sustainability, and the International Journal of Human Resource Management, as well as the top-three keywords: job performance, performance, and job.
Top-20 influential countries.
Three-field plot.
In conclusion, Chinese corresponding authors dominate employee job performance-related research in the world as a top one based on the Web of Science database source, and employee performance research is also of high interest to USA and Korean researchers.
The country’s production of articles over time will vary from country to country depending on the authors and institutions research interests or real situations each year. When we observe the above Figure 7, it demonstrates that Chinese authors interest in the topic increased dramatically after 2018 and a high number of articles were conducted recently in 2022, while USA authors interest in the field increased through the process from year to year and they conducted a high number of articles following China. But in the rest of the countries of Korea, Pakistan, and The Netherlands, researchers interest in this research theme was not as high as in China and the USA, and their production over time has changed a little each year. Based on this observation, we can conclude that the topic of employee job performance is attracting the attention of both Chinese and American researchers from time to time.
Top-five countries production over time.
Authorship
According to evidence from a thorough analysis, authors who publish data that statistically prove their working hypotheses are accurate to get 1.6–2.7 times more citations than those who, very reasonably, disclose non-significant and negative results (Duyx et al., 2017). Editing, organizing, and properly illuminating articles can improve the likelihood that they will be published in highly regarded and widely prestigious sources. When research is well known, readers may become more interested in it, and it may also receive helpful post-publication feedback and pertinent citations (Wagner & Jonkers, 2017).
Based on the data shown in Figure 8, the top 5 locally citing authors are Bakker AB. (with a total citation count of 672), Zhang Y (with a total citation count of 603), Judge TA. (with a total citation count of 559), Hur WM. (with a total citation count of 476), and Caratepe OM. (with a total citation count of 437). While the authors Crawford ER, Lepine JA, Wang H, Zapata CP, and Chen XP occupied the rank of 6 to 10 with the total citations of 406, 402, 339, 339, and 323 respectively, This clearly demonstrates that these authors, who gained numerous citations as a result of their extensive academic work, can be seen as the creators and contributors of ideas that have an impact on scientific advancement in this area of research.
Authors impact by total citation index.
In addition, Figure 9 illustrated that the most globally cited document was the article authored by Judge TA (2015) which was published in the Academy of Management Journal with 672 citations. The second to fifth-ranked most globally cited documents are Chen XP (2014), which was published in the Journal of Management and has 323 citations; Korschun D (2014), published in the Journal of Marketing with 260 citations; Karatepe OM (2013), from the International Journal of Hospitality Management, with a citation of 251; and Ali Hassan H (2015), from The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, with a citation of 230, respectively and other five papers follows them based on their citation order as shown in the above figure. In conclusion, the above five papers have a higher global citation impact than the whole set of documents observed in this study.
Most global cited documents.
Most Influential Institutions
We examine the author’s affiliations to ascertain the primary author’s working institutions that are sources for research in the domain of job performance. In the above Figure 10, we determine the top 20 affiliations in terms of the number of papers that are written by authors from the institutions. As shown in the figure, the top institution from the observed papers in this field is Peking University, China, with 35 authored publications. This indicates that around 35 scholars from this institution produced papers on the subject of employee job performance within the given time frame. The second-top institution is Brock University in Canada, with 32 authored publications, and the third is Beijing Normal University in China, with 24 publications produced by authors from this institution. This clearly demonstrates that, from the top three author affiliations, two are from China and one is from Canada, which indicates that authors from China are more interested in this field of study than other countries. The rest of the top authors affiliations include Zhejang University with 23 publications; in addition Erasmus University, Renmin University of China, University of Science and Technology China, and Yonsei University all are with 22 publications; Jangsu University and University of Hong Kong with 20 publications, also the other affiliations contributed to the field as stated on the above figure. In conclusion, most of the authors affiliations who published papers on the field are from China.
Most influential authors affiliations.
Specific Authorship Collaborations and Citation Analysis
Co-citation Network Analysis
According to M. H. Wang et al. (2010), co-citation analysis may be done either based on authors or publications, where the former helps disclose the social structure of the study area while the latter exposes its intellectual structure. This investigation can show the key research areas within a topic and how they evolve and change over time across various publications.
We tracked pairs of papers that are cited together in the same source articles to check the Co-citation network analysis. We can say that authors are co-cited when different pairs of papers are cited by another single paper together; this mainly happens when these papers share some common theme in the field. As shown in above Figure 11, there are high numbers of Co-citation networks between many publications that were observed for this study, but from these publications, we can identify the top Co-cited papers. Based on the analysis results of the study, the top three most Co-cited authors are Podsakoff PM (2003), Williams LJ (1991), and Fornell C (1981); this clearly indicates that these three papers are cited many times together in a number of single publications in the field. As shown in the above figure, we can conclude that the three nodes with the strongest connections are displayed in the network’s center with red colors and larger sizes than the rest, while the less-connected nodes surrounding the larger nodes have smaller sizes and fewer articles that are co-cited with them.
Co-citation network.
Countries Citation Analysis
The bibliometric analysis result generated from the study data explored the top 20 most cited countries to see which articles were highly cited and where they were from. Evidence from Figure 12 proves that the top-5 highly cited countries are the USA with 5,874 citations, China with more than 4,840 citations, the Netherlands with more than 1,250 citations, Korea with more than 1,227 citations, and Canada with more than 1,167 citations. The other countries ranked from six to ten based on their citations are the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Spain, respectively, with less than 1,000 citations. The result clearly proves that most of the highly cited publications are from the United States, and secondly, China is the top-cited country in the field, but the other countries citation rates are very low when we compare them with these two countries.
Most cited countries.
Country Collaboration of Co-authorship
Research with many authors (Co-authorship) is more typical across several academic fields and has already been demonstrated to be appropriate in HRM researches. Given that HRM is a diverse field of study, emerging through collaborative research practises is crucial for those who practise it. Scholars and scholar-practitioners must be receptive to this change and flexible in their approaches. They must be able to take part in managing and assessing new joint initiatives. These initiatives will help HRM researchers and scholar-practitioners and may launch a brand-new area of study in Cross-Disciplinary Research. Since scholarly collaboration is crucial for the growth of any field, there is often a need for more global cooperation (Turner & Baker, 2020). Schubert and Schubert (2020) discovered that co-authorship preference is affected by cultural ties, geopolitical position, or language. They also discovered that articles with international co-authors receive significantly more citations than those with local co-authors. Their study demonstrates that co-authorship across national boundaries is significantly influenced by language and geopolitical affinity.
Figures 13 and 14 above shows that China’s scholars are more receptive to working with their colleagues in many other nations, mostly the United States of America and others including Australia, Canada, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, and that their research articles have the greatest co-authorship rate than others observed in this study. The same is true for the authors from the United States of America, who mainly collaborate with Chinese authors and also have some collaboration with many countries, including Australia, Malaysia, Korea, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries; their collaboration is very high like that of China. In addition, Australian authors are more interested in collaborating with Chinese, United Kingdom, and USA authors, while authors from Malaysia co-author with Canadian, American, UK, and Saudi Arabian authors. This clearly demonstrates that authors from China, the US, and Australia are more interested in doing research together, and their collaboration rate is also higher than that of other countries.
Network visualization map of the co-authorship.
Country collaboration network.
Most Active Source Titles
The above Figure 15 demonstrates the top 20 sources that published articles related to employee job performance from 2013 to 2023, based on the data generated from WoS. As a result, the top 10 sources for publications in the field are Frontiers in Psychology with 58 published documents, Sustainability with 40 articles, International Journal of Human Resource Management with 30 publications, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health with 24 articles, Journal of Applied Psychology with 21 publications, Personnel Review with 20 articles, Social Behaviour and Personality with 17 publications, International Journal of Selection and Assessment with 15 published documents, Journal of Business Research with 15 articles, and European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology with 14 publication documents. These listed journals and others displayed in the figure are the most relevant sources for the articles conducted on the employee job performance theme.
Top journals.
Discussions and Debates
Performance research is at the heart of human resource management and organizational behavior research (Awan et al., 2020). Employee job performance relates to what they accomplish on a daily basis and the steps they take to meet company goals (Campbell & Wiernik, 2015). Employee job performance studies have an enormous effect on any entity’s success for a variety of reasons, and they necessitate continual research to assist both commercial and public organizations in more efficiently achieving their goals. This study’s goals are to assess research trends, authorial features, country collaborations, citations, and papers that discuss workers’ job performance in both public and private organizations, as well as to examine research trends in the area.
The approach used for this study was quantitative research method. By using data from publication activities, a bibliometric analysis of 983 English-language research articles from the Web of Science database that were published between 2013 and 2023 was conducted. Only research articles were chosen as a document type for the investigation. The R-studio program was then used to process the list and produce a document with the required networking structure and format. Also the timespan for this bibliometric data was from 2013 to 2023, and the articles were generated from 314 different sources (Journals) in the Web of Science database. Based on the descriptive result of this analysis, the average citation rate of these documents is 22.7, which means it is a good citation rate per document, the authors used 2,525 keywords for their articles and the total number of authors for the above documents is 2,530 but from these, only 67 of them were authors of single-authored articles, this shows that most of the articles are authored in collaboration with other researchers instead of writing alone. To provide insights into the study, we have provided a list of keywords and the most frequently stated terms in the titles and researched in the employee job performance study, which were additionally identified and ranked. Based on the study result, the top keyword is “employee performance,” the second one is “performance,” followed by the word “job” as the third top-ranked word, which means the top 3 keywords are directly related to the study topic.
According to Miao et al. (2023) high-performance work systems promote organizational growth for employees, and organizations can foster employee growth by using high-performance work systems. As stated by Hanifa et al. (2023) study’s bibliometric analysis, the number of publications containing the term “performance management” is growing annually. There are several nations where performance management research is dispersed. Companies and organizations have to develop performance management systems. Despite some criticism, the performance management system’s application has the potential to improve performance management efficacy. Job crafting mediates the relationship between employee-experienced high-performance work systems and career objectives with job performance ( L.Wang & Chen, 2022). Employees’ who think that performance appraisals and other activities are fair can have a positive effect on the organization (Lyu et al., 2023). The Co-occurrence network diagram of this study demonstrates the most relevant keywords, which are studied together in every single research publication. So, based on the study result, the most frequently occurring keyword which occurred with many variables in each single study, is Job Performance, which is the main variable of this study. From this understanding, we can conclude that employee job performance is the most influential word to be researched and has a direct or indirect relationship with many variables in different organizations and every profession. Meanwhile, the researchers looked at the top 20 significant countries of related authors to discover which publications were written in which region about the specific study topic. This clearly illustrates that Chinese corresponding authors dominate employee job performance-related research in the globe, ranking first according to the Web of Science database source and that employee performance research is also of great interest to academics in the United States and Korea.
Employee job performance is described as the conduct of employees’ who are devoted to meeting predefined organizational goals (Tang et al., 2020). According to Onyancha and Maluleka (2011), working with authors from other developed countries appears to have significant benefits for authors from developing and underdeveloped nations. When compared to collaboration between sub-Saharan African nations and their global counterparts, the study indicated that knowledge development through cooperative research among sub-Saharan African countries is low and only contributes minimally. Similar to this, international collaboration has a greater influence on science than continental collaboration. More often than not, countries within the same geographic region contributed to the generation of knowledge in each other’s countries. According to the findings of Guo et al. (2023), supervisory developmental feedback has a positive effect on employee work performance, and job crafting is conducive to improving employee job performance. Another study’s findings suggest that capacity building has a positive and significant impact on employee performance. In contrast, leadership support hasn’t an influence on employee performance. However, the impact of capacity building and management support on employee performance is positive, and employee retention has a major moderating effect (Wassem et al., 2019).
Nguyen et al. (2017) observed that papers with more co-authors generated more citations and that the proportion of foreign collaborations has marginally declined over time. However, according to Witze (2020) research, there has been a significant rise in global scientific research collaboration over the past few decades. According to a study by Low et al. (2014) there is a linear relationship between the percentage of international collaboration and the journal impact factor, indicating that papers with international collaboration are of higher quality than those without such collaborations. Another study by Donkor et al. (2021) discovered that transformational and laissez-faire leadership have a statistically favorable and significant connection with job performance, but transactional leadership is insignificant. The result is that leaders should understand that every measure taken to increase subordinate commitment and work performance must consider acceptable leadership behavior.
The country’s production of articles over time will vary from country to country depending on the authors and institutions research interests or real situations each year. When we observe the result, it reveals that Chinese authors interest in the topic increased dramatically after 2018 and a high number of articles were conducted recently in 2022, while USA authors interest in the field increased through the process from year to year and they conducted a high number of articles following China. Based on this observation, we can conclude that the topic of employee job performance is attracting the attention of both Chinese and American researchers from time to time. In addition the top five locally citing authors are Bakker AB, Zhang Y, Judge TA, Hur WM, and Caratepe OM. We tracked pairs of papers that are cited together in the same source articles to check the Co-citation network analysis. Based on the analysis results of the study, the top three most Co-cited authors are Podsakoff PM (2003), Williams LJ (1991), and Fornell C (1981); this clearly indicates that these three papers are cited many times together in a number of single publications in the field.
Additionally, the bibliometric analysis result generated from the study data explored the most cited countries to see which articles were highly cited and where they were from and the result clearly proves that most of the highly cited publications are from the United States, and secondly, China is the top-cited country in the field, but the other countries citation rates are very low when we compare them with these two countries. This clearly demonstrates that authors from China, the US, and Australia are more interested in doing research together, and their collaboration rate is also higher than that of other countries.
The effectiveness of a comprehensive performance management system and job engagement had a significant effect on employees’ task and context-related performance. Additionally, complementary mediation of employee job engagement in this relationship was validated. The study also recommends that a comprehensive performance management system model, which includes the perception of justice as an essential component, might be used to improve workers’ job engagement and task/contextual performance (Awan et al., 2020). International research collaboration is hailed as the distinguishing feature of modern scientific output. However, there isn’t much quantitative data that shows the landscape and patterns of this kind of collaboration. The study findings show that while the number of author collaborations in larger research teams has not considerably increased over the past 10 years, those in smaller research teams have experienced significant expansion (Gazn et al., 2013).
But, according to Sonnenwald (2007) there has been a growth in recent decades in the study of scientific collaboration. Due to its unique ability to handle complicated, pressing issues, scientific collaboration is becoming more and more important. New collaborative tactics will be necessary when new problems appear, new objectives for science are introduced, and as the environments in which science is conducted keep changing. Scientific collaboration research should be continued and expanded because new approaches must be found in order to solve the numerous problems that remain unsolved and to address the many open topics.
Also we examine the author’s affiliations to ascertain the primary author’s working institutions that are sources for research in the domain of job performance, then the top institution from the observed papers in this field is Peking University, China, with 35 authored publications. This indicates that around 35 scholars from this institution produced papers on the subject of employee job performance within the given time frame. The number of nations where a large proportion of research is of high global rank is growing dramatically. China is highlighted in particular, as one of the world’s leading scientific countries. In general, research partnerships between China and Western nations serve as an example of the overall trend toward increased complexity in the field of research. From an individual to an institutional level, it has increasingly become clear that disparities across institutional environments need to be controlled more methodically in order to encourage international research collaboration for mutual benefit (Shih & Forsberg, 2023). The second-top institution is Brock University in Canada and the third is Beijing Normal University in China. This clearly demonstrates that, from the top three author affiliations, two are from China and one is from Canada, which indicates that authors from China are more interested in this field of study than other countries. In addition, the top sources for publications in the field are Frontiers in Psychology, Sustainability, International Journal of Human Resource Management, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and Journal of Applied Psychology. These listed journals and others are the most relevant sources for the articles conducted on the employee job performance theme.
Theoretical Implications
This work has produced a number of findings that have theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, the study adds to the growing body of research on employee job performance in all types of organizations, allows for the identification of emerging trends in this field, and reveal to the scientific community the primary areas of study that have been pursued by researchers since their inclusion in the WoS database. In addition, emerging themes on the work performance construct have been identified using various bibliometric indicators. And, the research may provide a diversity of information, as a model and guide, to future studies looking for information on employee performance and factors like authors, institutions, nations, publications, most-cited articles, co-citations, or other more specific subjects. This bibliometric analysis adds to the field’s knowledge in several ways. Through an examination of researcher collaborations and citations, the study outlines the networks within the area, allows for the evaluation of the significance and influence of various studies on the topic of employee performance. This can help researchers and practitioners stay up-to-date on new developments and areas of interest. By examining the literature across different disciplines, the study uncovers cross-disciplinary insights and connections relevant to employee performance. Overall, this study advances knowledge by providing quantitative and scientific insights into the field of employee performance research, promoting a greater comprehension of the subject, and proposing potential directions of research.
Practical Implications
Practically, this investigation demonstrates a number of pragmatic implications relating to the theme “employee job performance” for organizations that require information about the field and directly impacts groups like the public, private, NGOs, business or non-business, and from small to corporate-level enterprises. The study sets a well-developed roadmap for policy and practice by highlighting the most influential research findings and guiding decision-making processes in organizations and institutions concerned with employee performance. Policy-makers and organization leaders may use this bibliometric analysis finding to pinpoint key trends in the filed on employee job performance research as well as decide which subjects have attracted the greatest interest, which areas need more exploration, and where knowledge gaps could exist. This analysis allows for benchmarking and comparative analysis of research output across different organizations, sectors, or regions. Leaders and policy-makers may make better-informed, evidence-based decisions by comparing the volume and caliber of studies on employee job performance within their organization or industry against external benchmarks. They can use this information to anticipate future challenges or opportunities and proactively shape and reshape research agendas or organizational strategies accordingly. In sum, the finding can offer insightful information and helpful guides to assist organizational leadership and evidence-based policy-making, which will eventually lead to better performance and results for both businesses and workers.
Conclusions
In conclusion, as we observe from the results generated from a bibliometric analysis of 983 English-language research articles tracked from the Web of Science database that were published between 2013 and 2023, the research trends, authorial collaborations, country collaborations, citations, co-citations, and research papers that discuss workers’ job performance in both public and private organizations have significantly increased and the topic is attracting the researchers interest time to time, but still, most of these scientific research activities are dominated by fewer countries researchers from China, USA and Korea. So the researchers recommend that, as the field of employee performance is broad and important for any kind of organization, future researchers from the rest of the world should try to collaborate with each other to find out better approaches, share experience and knowledge, investigate major problems in the field, generate scientific results that can enhance the performance of workers, and contribute to the literature in the area.
Considering the typicality, representation, coverage, academic influences and “gravity” in the filed of employee job performance research, the present study mainly focuses on the Web of Science database and does not incorporate, by design, other databases, such as Scopus, Google Scholar, etc. which may have different research focuses, comparatively limited publications and research influences in job performance study, or overlap with journals in Web of Science database. Nevertheless, to produce an updated, possibly more comprehensive, and inclusive research findings, future study may take into account of multiple databases to provide a more general picture on employee job performance study.
Footnotes
Authors’ Contributions
“EAE,” “ZW,” “NJ,” “FG,” and “HJ” conducted the overall research jointly.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Consent Statement
The authors transfers the copyright of this article to the journal to process it on behalf of the author
Data Availability Statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.