Technology, Behavior Tracking, and the Future of Work
This research aims to advance current understanding of the psychological impact of novel technologies on individuals in organizations. Leveraging theory on how individuals experience social contexts, this research proposes and tests the central idea that technology reduces people’s social evaluation concerns, thereby attenuating the evaluative aspect of social situations while highlighting their informational aspect. Thus, interacting with or through technology (as opposed to with other humans) shifts people’s focus from evaluation to information, leading to profound implications for organizational actors. Raveendhran builds evidence for this claim by testing this idea in the context of two rapidly spreading types of new technologies – behavior tracking products and virtual reality. First, she examines how the shift in focus from evaluation to information influences people’s willingness to adopt and use behavior tracking products. Second, she builds on the idea that technology shifts people’s focus from evaluation to information to examine when and why managers use virtual reality to monitor their employees. Specifically, her findings show that technology lowers people’s social evaluation concerns and, as a result, (1) increases their willingness to adopt behavior tracking products, and (2) influences their willingness to use virtual reality for monitoring employees. I argue that these findings offer fundamental insights about the psychological impact of technology and inform our understanding of people’s behaviors in relation to new technologies. More broadly, this work provides a novel theoretical perspective that highlights the social psychological functions of technology and opens avenues for exploring the implications of these effects in various social and work-related contexts.
Roshni Raveendhran is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior area at UVA's Darden School of Business. She received her Ph.D. in Business Administration (Management) from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She received the USC Award for Excellence in Teaching, an award that recognizes top graduate instructors in the university. Her research focuses on understanding the future of work. In particular, she examines how technological advancements influence organizational actors, workplace practices, and the management of employees. In doing so, she develops insights about how organizations can effectively integrate novel technologies into the workplace to manage their employees. She also explores how organizations can increase the effectiveness of their human resource management practices to address the changing nature of work. Her dissertation on behavior-tracking technologies was recognized as a finalist in the INFORMS Best Dissertation competition in 2017. She teaches an elective on “Negotiations” and the first-year core course on “Leading Organizations”.