诚实的奖励:员工自我效能感、差错承认与绩效评估关系探究

犯错在组织中并不少见。但基于建立良好形象的动机,员工很少会主动承认差错。基于自我认知和信息加工理论,提出员工积极自我认知会促进差错承认,同时差错承认会向上级传递信号影响其对员工的绩效评估。通过对675名员工及其配对上级两阶段的调研,使用三明治分析方法,发现员工自我效能感正向影响差错承认;差错承认对上级评价员工任务绩效无显著影响,但会显著降低上级对员工反生产行为的评估,由此说明了差错承认的奖励。

The Reward of Being Honest: The Antecedent and Outcome of Employees' Admitting Errors

Making errors or not being able to finish tasks on time is not a rare phenomenon in organizations, especially under the increasing fierce competition and high pressure to finish tasks in a relatively short time. Yet due to motivation of building good image to the supervisors (Leary & Kowalski, 1990), employees are less likely to proactively admit their errors. However, based on the self-cognition theory (Bandura, 1977), it proposed that those with high self-confidence can admit errors. Moreover, this study attempted to explore whether employees’ admitting errors can have detrimental effect of leaders’ evaluation. Overall, this study developed a model that integrates the antecedent as employees' self-efficacy and the outcomes as leaders' evaluation of employees' task and counterproductive behaviors. To examine the causal effect, this study collected data in 2 waves. In time 1, it collected employees’ demographic variables and employees’ self-efficacy; in time 2, it collected employees’ evaluation of their admitting errors behaviors. Also, in time 2, the supervisors were asked to evaluate their subordinates’ performance as task performance and counterproductive behaviors. In short, in time 1, it gained 761 samples, while in time 2, 675 employees and their direct supervisors responded the questionnaire, with a response rate of 89%. In the sample, every 1 leader needs to evaluate 11 employees. To rule out leaders’ impact in evaluating employees’ performance, this study adopted sandwiches estimator from Liu et al.’s (2015) study and used Mplus 6.0 to do the analysis. Results revealed that 1) employees' self-efficacy was positively related to admitting error behaviors (β = .10, p < .05); 2) employees' admitting errors had non-significant relationship with leaders' evaluation of employees' task performance (β = .08, n.s.), but was negatively related to leaders' evaluation of employees' counterproductive behaviors (β = -.19, p < .05). These results demonstrated that admitting errors is not that detrimental to leaders' evaluation of employees' performance, in fact, admitting errors can help to reduce leaders’ evaluation of individuals’ deviant behaviors. This study has both theoretical and practical implications. For the theoretical implications, it figured out the importance of employees’ proactively admitting error behaviors in organizations and illustrated the self-efficacy in influencing employees’ such behaviors; moreover, it depicted that leaders’ evaluations on employees are based more on the information they get rather than just rely on their impressions towards employees, which extends prior studies that put more emphasis on leaders’ impression-based evaluation. In addition, it is also an attempt to explore employees’ moral decisions facing the pro-self vs. pro-organization long-term benefits. For the practical implications, it offered some insights for leaders and employees. Specifically, when behaving in the organizations, employees should make their decisions based on the organizations’ overall benefits, which means sometimes to sacrifice their own interests. Such devotions would be recognized by the leaders, if not being repaid. Moreover, leaders should behave justice and reliable when evaluate employees’ performance, and should rely on facts and information rather than solely on impression. In terms of future studies, it suggested that further studies can explore other antecedents as employees’ conscientiousness, learning goal orientation, integrity, leadership style, organizational learning climate etc. as well as other outcomes like coworkers’ evaluations, the customers’ evaluation, to enrich the studies on employees’ proactively admitting errors in organizations.