Design and Evaluation of a Large Interactive Display to Support Social Interaction at Work

Social interaction at work has been shown to enhance creativity and productivity. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a large, interactive display that aims to stimulate social interaction amongst co-workers by providing food for talk in the form of activities, jokes, and music. User and system requirements were collected using Cultural Probes and Focus groups. The evaluation of our prototype system provides valuable insights that may guide the design of future systems supporting social interaction at work.status: publishe

Social Interactions and Feelings of Inferiority among Correctional Officers - a Daily Event-Recording Approach

Contains fulltext : 27946.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)A daily event-recording method, referred to as the Daily Interaction Record in Organizations (DIRO) was employed for assessing the influence of three types of social interaction on negative affect at work. For this purpose, 38 correctional officers (COs) completed forms, for a l-week period, that described their social interactions and stressful events at work. Moreover, the forms measured the negative feelings of COs both at the beginning and at the end of the workday. The results showed that each type of social interaction had a different effect on negative affect at the end of the day. Instrumental support showed an adverse effect on negative affect because this type of support appeared to induce feelings of inferiority, which in turn led to negative affect. Rewarding companionship appeared to have a positive effect, whereas intimate support showed no effect at all on negative affect. It is concluded that a micro-analytic approach offers interesting possibilities for fine-grained analyses of daily occurring social interactions and psychological mechanisms involved in social support as related to negative affect

Social comparison-based thoughts in groups: Their associations with interpersonal trust and learning outcomes

This study relates thoughts derived from 4 types of social comparison to trust and individual learning. Our study (N = 362 students) showed that upward identification (i.e., believing one is just as good as a better performing teammate) was positively related to trust and individual learning. Upward contrast (i.e., believing one is worse than a better performing group member) was negatively related to learning, as were downward-identifying thoughts (i.e., believing one will perform as badly as a poorly performing teammate). Downward contrast (i.e., thinking one can do much better than the poor performer) was negatively related to trust. We concluded that social comparison-based thoughts are important to consider when designing teamwork because of their constructive and destructive consequences