Moliterno, T.P., Beck, N., Beckman, C.M., & Meyer, M. (2014) Knowing your place: Social performance feedback in good times & bad times

Question 1

Goal

Answer 1

Expand social performance feedback to normative and comparative refence groups

Question 2

Organizational decision makers have reference groups smaller than the whole industry and use these groups as normative and comparative functions.

Answer 2

Organizational decision makers have reference groups smaller than the whole industry and use these groups as normative and comparative functions.
- Normative: Is the standard for group membership, the performance level below which decision makers cannot legitimately claim membership in a socially desirable group. > the Survival or Failure threshold > Reference group threshold
- Comparative: leads decision makers to aspire to perform better than others in their group and attend to top performance benchmarks within their group. > Top performers > top performance threshold

Question 3

Decision makers benchmark performance on ?

Answer 3

Decision makers benchmark performance on the social performance threshold most proximal to the organization’s historical performance. We refer to this as the historically based social aspiration threshold (HiBSAT).
- Managers are boundedly rational, so instead of seeing social and historical as two separate things; the two of them were taken together: HiBSAT

Question 4

low position in the reference group as negative performance feedback should trigger?

Answer 4

The normative function of the reference group motivates organizational decision makers to interpret a low position in the reference group as negative performance feedback and should trigger problemistic search resulting in organizational adaptation.
- Failing the survival threshold = drastic = New coach
- Failing top performance threshold = less drastic = New player

Question 5

Do they pursue both at the same time?

Answer 5

These two thresholds are likely not pursued at the same time but rather decided through historical performance. A historically lower scoring team is likely pursuing above the survival threshold, a historically higher scoring team is likely pursuing above the top performance threshold.
- Simply put, decision makers know their place in the competitive group and derive performance feedback based on that place