Social Facilitation - Electronic Performance Monitoring

Electronic Performance Monitoring

Researchers have used electronic performance monitoring to examine the effects of social facilitation, which is the established the tendency for individuals to improve performance while completing a task that is completed in the presence of others. This trend had previously been limited to face-to-face, or group settings. Electronic Performance Monitoring (EPM) on the other hand establishes the impact of social facilitation in a virtual sense. Electronic Performance monitoring is the utilization of information technologies, (i.e. computer networks) to track, evaluate, analyze and report information regarding an employee's performance. Many businesses have adopted this method in which workers activity is automatically monitored throughout the workday. This topic is of substantial interest to those in the field of social psychology due to underlying mechanism at work, namely the phenomena of social facilitation.

One study found that EPM did enhance productivity, but only in ways that are consistent with the effects of social facilitation. Employees working on a data entry task were monitored while working alone, with others, or as part of a cohesive group. Results indicated that EPM improved the performance of highly skilled workers, however it was found to interfere with the performance of those who were less skilled. Moreover, with the exception of those working in a cohesive group, Monitoring was found to increase workers’ feelings’ of stress and anxiety. On the other hand, participants responded more favorably to performance monitoring when they believed that they could turn off the monitoring and that only their job-related activities were being evaluated. Also, EPM was viewed more positively when workers were given the opportunity to participate in decisions regarding the use of the system. It can be concluded therefore that the effect of social facilitation is not limited to the physical presence of others, as a presence in a virtual sense has yielded supporting results.

In 2009, Thompson, Sebastienelli and Murray conducted an experiment to determine the effect of electronic monitoring on students who used web-based training to learn new online search skills. They found that participants who were explicitly told that their training was being monitored performed markedly worse on a post-training skills test than participants who were unaware that their training was being monitored. These findings adhere to the basic premise of social facilitation and reveal that the heightened awareness of evaluation on complex tasks significantly hinders performance.