Effects of Upward and Downward Social Comparison on Productivity in Cell Production System

Abstract

A lot of companies have introduced cell production systems, and realized empirically that it is very effective to prompt workers to compare themselves with or compete against others for improving cells’ performance. As there is still insufficient researches to deal with human-related factors in cell production systems, fewer academic studies have paid attention to address the effect of social comparison in cell production systems. This study intends to explore effective social comparisons for improvement of cell production systems, and conduct an academic examination on the effects of upward and downward social comparison on the function of production cells. We design and conduct a cell production experiment. Based on the experiment result of 70 workers, we conduct a three-way ANOVA and two Bonferroni’s multiple comparison tests. Through our experiment and analysis, it is clear that downward comparison has a stronger effect to enhance the productivity of production cells comparing to the upward comparison.