【公开学术报告】When does catalyzing social comparisons cause growth?

When does catalyzing social comparisons cause growth?

Guest Speaker:   Dr. Nghi Truong (ESMT Berlin)

Date & Time:      15:00-16:30 (Shanghai Time), Wed. 2nd, Nov. 2022

Zoom Meeting:   882 049 24027（Password: 539578）

Click the Link:    https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88204924027 

ABSTRACT

When does a manager’s choice to activate social comparisons among employees prompt organizational growth? When should a manager instead allow employees to form aspirations and exert effort in relative autonomy, based on their own past performance? To address these questions, we develop an agent-based model that examines the growth-related effects of these two contrasting approaches. Our analyses reveal that activating social comparisons can be either beneficial or corrupting depending on three features of organizational context drawn from performance feedback theory: (i) employees’ goal adaptation rates, (ii) employees’ tendencies to engage in self-improvement, self-assessment, or self-enhancement, and (iii) the skewness of the distribution of their initial goals. We find that whether this distribution is right-skewed (the highly ambitious constitute the right tail) or left-skewed (the un-ambitious comprise the left tail) acts as the governing contextual moderator. Under right skew, social comparisons promote growth. Under left-skew, this effect reverses, but not if employees self-improve or adapt slowly: Slow adaptation “purifies” the intrafirm monitoring network of otherwise corrupting stimuli and thus restores the link between social comparisons and growth. Implications for research in performance feedback theory and organizational design are discussed.