۱- Limitations of the previous work

۲- The present study

۳- Experiment 1

۴- Method

۵- Results

۶- Experiment one discussion

۷- Experiment 2

۸- Method

۹- Results

۱۰- Experiment two discussion

۱۱- General discussion

۱۲- Conclusion

References

Abstract

Electronic Performance Monitoring, or EPM, has been described as the use of electronic systems to monitor and evaluate performance. Research on the effects of EPM has indicated that electronic monitoring may improve employee productivity and performance. However, most of the prior research has utilized computer-based electronic presence to examine the effects of EPM on short-duration, clerical-based tasks. Relatively little is known about how EPM can affect longer-duration sustained attention tasks, like vigilance. The present study was comprised of two experiments that sought to examine the effects of EPM on sustained attention and to provide further evidence that video-based monitoring can be an effective form of EPM. A total of 197 participants (106 in experiment one and 91 in experiment two) completed a 24-minute cognitive-based vigilance task. The results indicated that not only could EPM improve sustained attention, but also that video-based electronic presence was an effective implementation of EPM. However, the results also indicated that the most robust performance effects were associated with employing two forms of video-based electronic presence simultaneously rather than individually. Theoretical implications and practical applications are further discussed.

Limitations of the previous work

While previous research has demonstrated performance effects consistent with the overarching social facilitation research, some aspects of EPM are still unclear. For instance, EPM is traditionally operationalized as the presence of either an on-screen computer icon (i.e., Davidson & Henderson, 2000), or through computer-based monitoring (i.e., keystrokes, Aiello & Kolb, 1995). While EPM has also been employed through an on-screen virtual human (i.e., Park & Catrambone, 2007), and a social robot (i.e., Reither et al., 2012), it has rarely been operationalized as video-based monitoring, even though organizations have reported using video-monitoring to monitor and evaluate their employees’ performance (American Management Association & EPolicy Institute, 2007). Given the prevalence of video-based EPM in real organizations, it is surprising that relatively little research has examined these effects. Moreover, as this form of EPM has been previously understudied, it is possible that video-based EPM results in fundamentally different performance effects relative to computer-based or robotic forms of EPM. Thus, further work is needed to explore how different conceptualizations of EPM, such as video-based monitoring, can influence task performance.