Electronic Performance Monitoring and sustained attention: Social facilitation for modern applications

Abstract Electronic Performance Monitoring, or EPM, has been described as the use of electronic systems to monitor and evaluate performance. Research on the effects of EPM has indicated that electronic monitoring may improve employee productivity and performance. However, most of the prior research has utilized computer-based electronic presence to examine the effects of EPM on short-duration, clerical-based tasks. Relatively little is known about how EPM can affect longer-duration sustained attention tasks, like vigilance. The present study was comprised of two experiments that sought to examine the effects of EPM on sustained attention and to provide further evidence that video-based monitoring can be an effective form of EPM. A total of 197 participants (106 in experiment one and 91 in experiment two) completed a 24-minute cognitive-based vigilance task. The results indicated that not only could EPM improve sustained attention, but also that video-based electronic presence was an effective implementation of EPM. However, the results also indicated that the most robust performance effects were associated with employing two forms of video-based electronic presence simultaneously rather than individually. Theoretical implications and practical applications are further discussed.