• Influence of Leader Interactions on Reactions to Monitoring

Investigator: Dr. Jack Aiello

A number of theories and empirical studies suggest that individuals' reactions to computer monitoring may be strongly influenced by other factors such as leader behavior. Organizational justice theory has also recently begun to recognize the importance of two aspects of leader behavior that relate to how the leader interacts with members of his/her work group: interpersonal fairness and informational fairness. While both the monitoring and justice literatures suggest that leader interactions may affect individuals' reactions to monitoring, there is not yet any empirical evidence that interpersonal style and informational style make a difference.

The goal of this study is to test these relationships and develop evidence that will provide knowledge about how leader behaviors affect reactions people have to monitoring.

Critical research questions: How do leader interactions affect the way people react to different kinds of task monitoring? Specifically, how do these interactions affect individual perceptions of fairness, trust in their leader, perceptions of supervisor support and performance under different monitoring conditions?

• Performance Monitoring and Achievement Goal Orientation

Investigator: Joshua Feinberg

The primary objective of this research is to ascertain how the presence of others affects performance in the workplace. These two particular studies extend the social facilitation framework by recording participants' individual achievement goals. More specifically, the objective entails the determining how differences in the three achievement goal orientations (approach, avoidance and mastery styles) might differentially influence worker performance as well as other related outcomes.

Each study had participants perform both a simple and complex task either with a supervisor absent or present. In the initial study, participants were simply asked a series of questions in which their answers were clues to their individual achievement goal orientations-there was no experimental manipulation in these achievement goals, whereas in the second study there was a manipulation. In fact, it was almost as if the three styles were separately evoked in each of the participants, by means of contrived instructions meant to evoke each achievement goal orientation separately, when performing the task.

The implications of these study's findings would be toward workplace design and task implementation-namely, supervisors henceforth might want to take into account individual goals when monitoring their employees, and furthermore assess employees' different achievement goal orientations. Based on these profiles they can they design an environment that best suits the particular outcomes which they might desire.

• The Influence of Supervisory Feedback and Monitoring on Performance

Investigator: Jill Grodkiewicz

It has previously been shown that the processing of various supervisory feedback types (esp. either positive or negative type) during task execution tends to elicit varying degrees of affective reactions, and hence either facilitative or inhibitory effects on said task performance tend to emerge. In this way, feedback type coupled with performance monitoring seems to evoke motivational behavior in employees with respect to task performance. The primary objective of this particular study is to determine the effects of electronic performance monitoring and supervisory feedback upon performance using a simple task, in a simulation of an actual workplace.  The social facilitation framework is extended by accounting for supervisory feedback's potential influences on worker performance when blended with electronic performance monitoring. As a research question, the interaction of supervisory feedback with time is quite an important consideration.

Accordingly, the independent variables are electronic performance monitoring (monitoring vs. no monitoring) and type of feedback (no feedback vs. high performance-induced negative feedback, low performance-induced negative feedback, and positive feedback).

This study's findings may have significant implications for the nature of supervisory behavior and feedback dispensation-indeed, an optimized model for supervisory feedback and its wider behavioral consequences in the workplace, with regard to employee performance, may be generated in future time.