Co-worker Performance Research Articles

Catalysts of worker-to-worker violence and incivility in hospitals.

To identify common catalysts of worker-to-worker violence and incivility in hospital settings. Worker-to-worker violence and incivility are prevalent forms of mistreatment in healthcare workplaces. These are forms of counterproductive work behaviour that can lead to negative outcomes for employees, patients and the organisation overall. Identifying the factors that lead to co-worker mistreatment is a critical first step in the development of interventions targeting these behaviours. Retrospective descriptive study. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on the total sample (n = 141) of employee incident reports of worker-to-worker violence and incivility that were documented in 2011 at a large American hospital system. More than 50% of the incidents involved nurses, and the majority of incidents did not involve physical violence. Two primary themes emerged from the analysis: Work Behaviour and Work Organisation. Incidents in the Work Behaviour category were often sparked by unprofessional behaviour, disagreement over responsibilities for work tasks or methods of patient care, and dissatisfaction with a co-worker's performance. Incidents in the Work Organisation category involved conflicts or aggression arising from failure to following protocol, patient assignments, limited resources and high workload. Incidents of worker-to-worker violence and incivility stemmed from dissatisfaction with employee behaviour or from organisational practices or work constraints. These incident descriptions reflect worker dissatisfaction and frustration, resulting from poor communication and collaboration between employees, all of which threaten work productivity. Violence and incivility between hospital employees can contribute to turnover of top performers, hinder effective teamwork and jeopardise the quality of patient care. Identification of common catalysts for worker-to-worker violence and incivility informs the development of mistreatment prevention programmes that can be used to educate hospital staff.

How much has my co-worker contributed? The impact of anonymity and feedback on social loafing in asynchronous virtual collaboration

This paper reports an experiment that investigates how feedback about co-worker's performance and anonymity affect a team member's performance in an idea generation task conducted asynchronously. The results indicated that there was no main effect of anonymity: anonymity by itself did not affect group performance. Receiving information about co-worker's performance increased group performance; however, the perceived level of co-worker's performance did not affect group performance. Participants who perceived that their co-workers had high performance experienced significantly more social comparison with identified input than with anonymous input. However, this motivation gain did not translate into a performance gain. Implications of these results and future research are discussed.

Task Performance and Interpersonal Attraction in Children

LEVINE, JOHN M.; SNYDER, HOWARD N.; and MENDEZ-CARATINI, GLORIA. Task Performance and Interpersonal Attraction in Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 359-371. 2 studies investigated how performance information affects interpersonal attraction in children. In both experiments children worked on perceptual problems in simulated groups, received feedback about their own and other group members' performance, and then indicated their desire to interact with selected group members in various anticipated situations. Experiment 1 assessed first and second graders' preferences for cooperative work and play partners. This study revealed that children preferred high-performance to low-performance partners for both work and play. Moreover, as predicted, consensus information provided by the performance of other group members affected work-partner but not play-partner preferences. Experiment 2 assessed fourth and fifth graders' co-worker preferences for cooperative, competitive, and individualistic situations. This study revealed a positive relationship between a potential co-worker's performance and attractiveness in the cooperative and individualistic situations and a negative relationship in the competitive situation. Additional data indicated that attraction in cooperative and competitive situations was (a) mediated by the potential co-worker's absolute performance and (b) based on children's desire to maximize the probability of their succeeding on the task.