In a recent article, O’Boyle and Aguinis (2012) argued that job perfor-
mance is not distributed normally but instead is nonnormal and highly
skewed. However, we believe the extreme departures from normality ob-
served by these authors may have been due to characteristics of perfor-
mance measures used. To address this issue, we identify 7 measurement
criteria that we argue must be present for inferences to be made about
the distribution of job performance. Specifically, performance measures
must: (a) reflect behavior, (b) include an aggregation of multiple behav-
iors, (c) include the full range of performers, (d) include the full range
of performance, (e) be time bounded, (f) focus on comparable jobs, and
(g) not be distorted by motivational forces. Next, we present data from
a wide range of sources—including the workplace, laboratory, athletics,
and computer simulations—that illustrate settings in which failing to
meet one or more of these criteria led to a highly skewed distribution
providing a better fit to the data than a normal distribution. However,
measurement approaches that better align with the 7 criteria listed above
resulted in a normal distribution providing a better fit. We conclude that
large departures from normality are in many cases an artifact of mea-
surement.