How Reporting Policies Influence Employee Performance: An Empirical Study

In recent years, social media platforms and instant messaging applications have been witnessed to play an increasingly important role as a communication channel among employees to build effective organizations, which results in a considerably large part of individual activities moving onto the cyber-based workspace. The online behaviors of employees rely heavily on the policies or mechanisms formulated for the cyber-space, and are expected to impose a significant influence on their performance appraisal in the physical world In this paper, we focus on the typical online reporting behavior, and empirically study how the work reporting policies formulated by supervisors influence the employees' strategies and in turn their performance, using a unique real-world dataset collected from the Chinese social media platform called WeChat. We consider two types of work reporting policies: the one is concerned with the reporting time and the other with the duplication degree of reporting contents. First, we establish an optimization model, taking both the reputation-based and performance-related utilities into consideration, so as to examine the employees' reporting strategies and their actual work performance. On this basis, we make further discussions about the reporting policy optimization from the perspective of organization supervisors. Then, an empirical study on a median-size organization in China is conducted to validate our proposed model and analysis. The results prove our conclusion that the reporting policy will influence not only employees' reporting strategies, but also their actual work performance.