Electronic Performance Monitoring and sustained attention: Social facilitation for modern applications

Social facilitation effects in online coaction: the moderating role of social comparison direction

Online and face-to-face coactions are widely used work organization modes. This study aims to investigate the effect of social comparison direction on task performance when people coact online. A total of 40 individuals were recruited to participate in a 2 (coaction type: online and face to face) × 3 (social comparison direction: upward, downward and no comparison) × 2 (phase: pre-comparison and post-comparison) within-subject experiment. The participants performed visual search tasks while their response time and search accuracy rates were measured. Results showed that the participants were reported to perform faster when they coacted online than face to face. The upward comparison led to a stronger social facilitation effect than the downward and no comparison directions, either in online or face-to-face coaction. These findings provide practical implications in the design of coaction modes for groups and teams working remotely.

Human and machine-induced social stress and cognitive performance

The article examines the effects of social stress on work performance in a laboratory study using a battery of performance tests. Social stress was induced by a combination of negative feedback and ostracism. Participants received negative performance feedback and were ostracised by two confederates of the experimenter. Using a one-way experimental design with three levels (machine-induced stress, human-induced stress, and no stress), 102 participants performed the following tasks: attention, divergent and convergent creativity. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring positive and negative affect, and state self-esteem. The manipulation check confirmed that social stress was successfully implemented. The results showed that social stress increased negative affect and reduced self-esteem. However, performance remained unaffected by social stress on any of the cognitive tasks, with no difference emerging between human-induced and machine-induced stress. The findings provide support for the 'blank-out'-mechanism, which assumes that humans can maintain performance levels even under difficult working conditions. Practitioner summary: Social stress in the form of negative performance feedback and social exclusion has a negative impact on the affect and self-esteem of humans. However, performance on subsequent tasks was not impaired. Abbreviations: TSST: trier social stress test; SSES: state self-esteem scale; PANAS: positive and negative affect schedule; ANOVA: analysis of variance.