Track: Human Factors and Ergonomics Competition

Abstract

Although many companies have applied the social comparison theory to motivate the workers for improving their performance, the reason why social comparison sometimes is successful and other times not, is still not fully understood. Recently, we have built a structural equation model to clarify the psychological mechanism that the workers’ personality traits, mediated by their social comparison orientations, affect their response to the downward social comparison, and consequently have a significant influence on the workers’ motivation and performance. In this paper, we extend our previous research and conduct a clustering analysis of the workers based on the factor scores of personality traits, social comparison orientations, motivation and efficiency. This paper places our emphasis on offering more detailed insight into the workers’ proportion that how many workers respond positively or negatively to the downward social comparison, and providing some key points for practitioners to enhance the effect of downward social comparison.