Performance capacity is the potential of a person to perform purposeful mental and physical activities. This performance potential depends on psychological, physical and emotional influencing variables.
What is performance capacity?
Performance capacity is the potential of a person to perform purposeful mental and physical activities. An important factor is a person’s motivation, which drives him or her to perform or not perform certain activities. If motivation is lacking, a person quickly reaches the limits of his or her capacity. Every person has a physical, cognitive and emotional performance capacity. These are performance capacity and cognitive and emotional intelligence. These three important performance areas are usually closely linked, but they can also run separately. A person who is considered to have high cognitive performance capacity (intelligence) is often also emotionally compassionate toward his or her fellow human beings, meaning that his or her emotional intelligence is also well developed. However, these three pillars of performance can also operate separately. An elderly person with impaired physical capacity can still be mentally alert and emotionally compassionate.
Function and task
Human performance and intelligence are abstract quantities determined by measurement procedures. In the field of physical performance, for example, strength measurement in athletes or ergometry as a determinant of cardiovascular performance parameters in cardiac patients are used. Cognitive performance can be determined by various intelligence tests aimed at different target groups. It is a psychological diagnosis to measure a person’s intelligence. Unlike a person’s height, for example, intelligence cannot be conclusively determined. It can also be increased through exercise. Cognitive performance also always has something to do with inherited talents and inclinations, as well as the social environment. A supposedly non-intelligent student with poor grades from a poorly educated household would perhaps have completely different prerequisites if he were properly encouraged and motivated by his parents or other caregivers. Emotional intelligence can be determined by test procedures such as the “Emotional Competence Inventory” (ECI) or the “Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test” (MSCEIT). They determine the extent to which a person is able to cope in his social environment, how well he can assess situations and make decisions based on them. The emotional pillar of performance enables people to establish social contacts such as relationships and friendships. It also influences success in private life and at work, because it is not enough to be an intelligent high achiever with the best grades and degrees if the ability to motivate oneself and empathy toward fellow human beings are lacking. Biologically, there are limits to human performance. However, due to progress and an easier way of life, life expectancy has increased significantly. While people beyond the age of 60 were considered “old iron” just a few decades ago and felt that way, the “new old” are fitter today than ever before. Social change, improved medical care and technological progress have shifted general life expectancy upward, and with it performance in old age. Positive changes in working conditions enable people to remain fit for longer. The prerequisite, of course, is that they remain healthy. People of advanced age head research institutes, catch up on university degrees, make their mark on the arts and sciences, manage corporations and pass on their valuable knowledge to the next generation. A 60-year-old person today is as fit as a 50-year-old in the 1970s. What young people accomplish through physical fitness, older people often make up for through routine and life experience. In this way, a 60-year-old person may well achieve comparable results to a 40-year-old, depending on the activity.
Diseases and ailments
Despite improved conditions in the fields of work, medicine, and technology, people have biological limits.After a certain age, performance decreases, usually the performance curve in physical fitness begins to decline. Older people are no longer as agile as younger people, typical age-related complaints such as osteoarthritis, back pain and more rapid states of exhaustion can set in. In the cognitive area, responsiveness, speed and comprehension decrease. Diseases such as cancer, dementia, Alzheimer’s and heart problems, which statistically occur more frequently in the 50s and older, are the price society has to pay for prolonged performance and a long life. With an aging society, medical care and nursing care must be greatly expanded to guarantee care for the elderly. Medical progress, however, also allows elderly and sick people to live with only minor limitations. Pacemakers, hip replacements, and good advances in treatments for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments often allow for moderate disease progression.
