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Control Theory and Social Behavior in the Workplace

Department of Psychology, 580 Union Drive, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1346.

Mary Ann Glynn

Department of Organization and Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

James R. Larson, Jr.

Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60680.

Recent theoretical statements by Lord and Hanges (1987) and by Carver and Scheier (1981) suggest that supervision in the workplace can be analyzed as a control system made up of supervisors and subordinates. Two experiments are described which raise doubts about this claim. Subjects were engaged as supervisors and asked to provide performance feedback to a subordinate. It was found that subjects did not respond to subordinate work performance in the straightforward way predicted by control theory, but instead responded based on analyses of the context-dependent meanings of that performance. Implications of these results for applying the control system metaphor to social behavior in the workplace more generally are discussed.

Key Words: control theory • social behavior • feedback supervision

Human Relations, Vol. 44, No. 10, 1107-1130 (1991)
DOI: 10.1177/001872679104401006


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