Johannsen Rebecca, Zak Paul J
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, United States.
Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, Claremont, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 May 15;11:963. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00963. eCollection 2020.
Employees have been given increasing autonomy to work from home, from virtual offices, and during travel. Understanding why autonomy affects work behaviors has relied to date on self-reported data in which employees may consciously or unconsciously misattribute their own causal actions. We designed a neuroscience experiment to investigate the mechanisms through which greater autonomy affects individual and team performance and if this had an effect on mood. Participants ( = 100) were shown a three-min video that described the productivity impact of greater autonomy at work (treatment) or the productivity benefits of work-flow management software. Electrodermal responses were captured to measure physiologic effort and were related to the video stimuli, productivity, and mood. The treatment group had a 5.2% ( = 0.047) greater average productivity and 31% ( = 0.000) higher positive affect after the video than the control group average. Productivity was directly related to the physiologic effort put into the task for both the treatment and control groups, but the video prime did not increase effort compared to the control. The impact of physiologic effort on productivity continued to hold when controlling for participants' intrinsic motivation. We also found that individual productivity was associated with an increase in positive affect, while group productivity increased positive affect only for those in the treatment group. Our findings indicate that increased perceived autonomy can significantly improve individual and group productivity and that this can have a salubrious impact on mood, but the neurologic mechanism through which this occurs remains to be identified.
员工被赋予了越来越多的自主权，可以在家工作、通过虚拟办公室工作以及在出差期间工作。迄今为止，对于自主权为何会影响工作行为的理解，一直依赖于员工自我报告的数据，而在这些数据中，员工可能会有意识或无意识地错误归因于自己的因果行为。我们设计了一项神经科学实验，以研究更大的自主权影响个人和团队绩效的机制，以及这是否会对情绪产生影响。向100名参与者展示了一段三分钟的视频，该视频描述了工作中更大的自主权对生产力的影响（实验组）或工作流程管理软件对生产力的益处。记录皮肤电反应以测量生理努力程度，并将其与视频刺激、生产力和情绪相关联。与对照组平均水平相比，实验组在观看视频后平均生产力提高了5.2%（p = 0.047），积极情绪提高了31%（p = 0.000）。对于实验组和对照组而言，生产力都与投入任务的生理努力直接相关，但与对照组相比，视频启动并未增加努力程度。在控制参与者的内在动机时，生理努力对生产力的影响依然存在。我们还发现，个人生产力与积极情绪的增加相关，而团队生产力仅在实验组中增加了积极情绪。我们的研究结果表明，更高的自主权认知可以显著提高个人和团队的生产力，并且这可能会对情绪产生有益影响，但这种影响发生的神经机制仍有待确定。
