Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks

Paul  Green Jr.; Francesca  Gino; Bradley  Staats

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2017

Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks

by Paul Green Jr., Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats

Abstract

Many organizations employ interpersonal feedback processes as a structured means of informing and motivating employee improvement. Ample evidence suggests that these feedback processes are largely ineffective, and despite a wealth of prescriptive literature, these processes often fail to lead to employee motivation or improvement. We propose that these feedback processes are often ineffective because they represent threats to recipients’ positive self-concept. Because the self-concept is socially sustained, recipients will flee these threats or otherwise reshape their network to attenuate the negative psychological effects of the threat. Analyzing four years of peer feedback and social network data from an agribusiness company in the western U.S., we find that employees, in the face of feedback that is more negative than their own self-assessment in a given domain (i.e., disconfirming feedback), reshape their network in ways designed to attenuate the threat brought about by the feedback, and that this behavior is detrimental to their performance. In a laboratory study, we replicate these findings conceptually, showing that disconfirming feedback has such effects on one’s relationships and performance because it is perceived as threatening to one’s self-concept.

Keywords: developmental feedback; self-concept; positive illusions; social network; Threat; Identity; Social and Collaborative Networks; Behavior; Performance;

Language: English

Format: Print

68 pages

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Citation:

Green, Paul, Jr., Francesca Gino, and Bradley Staats. "Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-028, September 2017.

Article | Management Science | October 2020

Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process—task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision-making, we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload, individuals may choose to complete easier tasks in order to manage their load. We label this behavior task completion preference (TCP). Using six years of data from a hospital emergency department, we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, while it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks, as compared to hard ones, is related to lower learning in service times. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs due to both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion. These findings provide another mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed.

Keywords: healthcare; knowledge work; discretion; Workload; Employees; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity;

Citation:

KC, Diwas S., Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino. "Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance." Management Science 66, no. 10 (October 2020). View Details

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Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks

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