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Subjective Evaluation Of Professional Employees: Work-Day Duration As A Heuristic To Evaluate Output, Sara Wick

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The purpose of my dissertation is to investigate how information that should not signal output quality influences managers’ evaluations. To address this objective, I pose the following research question: In a setting where professional employees generate output that cannot be evaluated objectively, will managers use work-day duration to subjectively evaluate the quality of their output?

I address my research question using two experiments where I vary employees’ work-day duration relative to their peers (short versus equal) and the purpose of the evaluation (bonus versus promotion) while observing how supervisors make subjective quality evaluations about their output. I find that when …