See also Counterproductive Work Behaviors; Job Per- formance Models; Psychological Contract; Social Exchange Theory
FURTHER READING
Bolino, M. C., Turnley, W. H., & Niehoff, B. P. (2004). The other side of the story: Reexamining prevailing assump- tions about organizational citizenship behavior. Human Resource Management Review, 14,229−246.
Borman, W. C., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1993). Expanding the criterion domain to include elements of contextual performance. In N. Schmitt & W. C. Borman (Eds.), Personnel selection(pp. 71−98). San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.
Dalal, R. S. (2005). A meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and coun- terproductive behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90,1241−1255.
LePine, J. A., Erez, A., & Johnson, D. E. (2002). The nature and dimensionality of organizational citizenship behav- ior: A critical review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87,52−65.
Organ, D. W. (1988). Organizational citizenship behavior:
The good soldier syndrome.Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Organ, D. W., & Paine, J. B. (1999). A new kind of perfor- mance for industrial and organizational psychology:
Recent contributions to the study of organizational citi- zenship behavior. International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 14,337−368.
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Paine, J. B., &
Bachrach, D. G. (2000). Organizational citizenship behaviors: A critical review of the theoretical and empir- ical literature and suggestions for future research.
Journal of Management, 26,513−563.
Rotundo, M., & Sackett, P. R. (2002). The relative importance of task, citizenship, and counterproductive performance to global ratings of job performance: A policy-capturing approach. Journal of Applied Psychol- ogy, 87,66−80.
described previously) is conceptualized within hierar- chies of systems, and it is from this configuration that some of the more interesting phenomena emerge.
Specifically, three additional elements are described in these psychological versions:
1. The “actions” of higher-level control systems deter- mine the reference values for lower-level systems, and the perceptions from lower-level control sys- tems feed into higher-level control systems, allow- ing them to create more abstract and complex perceptions.
2. The reference signals can be diverted back to the sending system as a means of anticipating or esti- mating the effects of the system’s actions. Usually this is called a feed-forward process; it is control theory’s conceptualization of human thinking.
3. Some control systems monitor the operation of other systems and act on those systems by changing the three kinds of core functions described earlier.
This is control theory’s conceptualization of learning.
With these additional elements, control theorists hope to understand a wide range of phenomena in psychology. Likewise, within the field of industrial and organizational psychology, control theory and its variants have been used to address many issues. For example, human factors researchers are interested in the processes by which humans control aspects of their immediate physical environment. Control theory has been used as a significant explanatory tool in that domain. In addition, control theory has been applied to understanding stress and affective processes within work domains. However, control theory’s most prom- inent presence in industrial and organizational psy- chology relates to motivation and goal-striving behavior within organizations.
CONTROL THEORY AS A THEORY OF MOTIVATION
To understand control theory’s relevance to motiva- tion, one need only substitute the control theory notion of internally represented desired state(i.e., ref- erence signal) with the term goal. Thus, control theory provides an explanation of how individuals achieve and maintain their goals, whether individuals bring these goals with them or acquire them from the work
context. Indeed, another situation in which control theories are used is to describe when managers and supervisors are likely to communicate goals and desired behavioral patterns to their subordinate employees.
Elsewhere in this encyclopedia, you can read about the relevance of goals to understanding human moti- vation and how goals have practical implications for performance and other organizationally relevant out- comes (e.g., absenteeism). The literature on goals—
most developed without the benefit of control theory—has demonstrated robust, positive effects on motivation and performance for interventions based on goals and their properties. This has led some researchers to seek explanations for these goal effects (i.e., understand why goals have the effects they do) and to understanding how individuals coordinate the pursuit and maintenance of multiple goals more or less simultaneously. Researchers argue these under- standings may provide better or unique applications that have not yet been considered, and control theory is considered a major source for developing these understandings.
Alongside goals, another concept that has received a great deal of attention is feedback, a complex con- cept. In industrial and organizational psychology, feedback generally refers to the information that supervisors or others give employees regarding their performance or actions. This kind of feedback has long been considered important in organizational con- texts, and it is believed that interventions that increase feedback boost performance. Yet in this case, the empirical evidence is mixed, though generally posi- tive (i.e., feedback interventions generally improve performance). Control theory has been used here as well as a vehicle for understanding the processes by which feedback has its effects (both positive and neg- ative). Meanwhile, feedback is sometimes actively sought by employees; control theory is used to under- stand why and when that happens.
Across all applications, the concept that has received the most attention is the notion that infor- mation (i.e., feedback) may indicate discrepancies between perceptions and goals. These discrepancies, in turn, drive behaviors and the allocation of resources to reduce the discrepancies. For example, a perception of uncertainty regarding one’s performance is pre- sumably responsible for feedback-seeking behavior among individuals who desire certainty. The informa- tion received from that feedback-seeking episode 108———Control Theory
might, if it creates discrepancies with other work goals, motivate increased work.
However, given the complexity of work contexts, many times behaviors and the allocation process result in conflicts, such that individuals may behave in ways that take them away from or steal resources needed for other goals. Thus, a person’s attention might be drawn to one goal in his or her hierarchy, although it is needed in another. If both goals are required for effective performance, it is in the interest of the employee and the employers to figure out how to balance or regulate competing demands for resources. Indeed, at this point, researchers are inter- ested in simply understanding how control systems regulate (i.e., self-regulation). Worrying about how to optimize this regulation for specific outcomes requires a more thorough understanding of the pro- cesses involved.
CONTROVERSIES RELATED TO CONTROL THEORY
Although control theory has many adherents and vari- ants within industrial and organizational psychology, it also has some strong opponents. One source of opposition may stem from its success. That is, the multiple uses and phenomena to which control theory has been applied have produced so many variations that critics complain it is difficult to know what con- trol theory is and what it is not. Moreover, these vari- ations often incorporate ideas and concepts used by other theories, leading critics to wonder whether control theory makes any unique contribution to the theoretical landscape. For example, goals were in psy- chologists’ lexicon before control theory was brought to the field; thus, some argue it is not useful to mix psychological constructs with the control theory labels commonly used by engineers. Control theorists counter that the theory’s unique contribution is to explain why goals have the effects they do, not neces- sarily what the effects are.
Recently, control theorists have concerned them- selves with the concept of self-efficacy, a central con- struct in social cognitive theory. Self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s capacity to perform or act at a given level, is not a construct that is described within any version of control theory. However, self-efficacy mea- sures capture the results of the feed-forward process described within control theory. Moreover, the results of the feed-forward process, as it is used within
control systems, lead to similar—but not identical—
predictions that social cognitive theory describes for self-efficacy. Yet the points of divergence are what theoreticians find most interesting, and they may be practically relevant as well. In this case, social cogni- tive theory predicts strong positive effects. In contrast, control theory predicts weak negative effects for self- efficacy on motivation and performance during goal striving when goals do not change and when feedback is ambiguous. Recent research supports control the- ory’s predictions, which other researchers are now seeking to verify.
Control theory has also been criticized for its complexity. Control theory is a dynamic theory of processes. Most theories in industrial and organiza- tional psychology describe the relationships between variables, generally across individuals rather than across time. Variables that describe relationships across time do not specify the processes by which the relationships emerge. Dynamic process theories explain why factors covary (or don’t when it seems they should) over time. This makes control theory a very different kind of industrial and organizational theory. Indeed, this difference may be one of the main reasons it is appealing to so many researchers (i.e., it can be used to explain phenomena that other theories are not in a position to explain). Yet it is also difficult to reconcile with how one compares, contrasts, and tests typical theories in industrial and organizational psychology. Moreover, evidence has emerged that humans have difficulty predicting dynamic (i.e., changing) phenomena. Thus, trying to mentally simu- late (i.e., think through) a dynamic theory’s predic- tions about dynamic phenomena may be difficult—all the more reason for such a theory, say its proponents.
The preceding paragraph implied that the complex- ity of control theory arises from the limitation of human minds, particularly those without much exper- ience thinking about phenomena dynamically.
However, it seems that by most criteria, control theory models become extremely complex as the number of control systems used to explain a particular phenome- non increases. Indeed, control theorists, presumably facile at thinking dynamically, either describe rela- tively simple models (single or only a few control systems) or render the models mathematically (i.e., computational models) that can be simulated. The lat- ter approach is likely necessary because the control theory explanation is too complex to think through.
One needs the computation tools of simulations to Control Theory———109
follow the implications of the control systems described. This is what engineers do, and psycholo- gists are just beginning to use this process (especially in human factors research). It remains to be seen how useful the simulation tool will be to researchers exam- ining motivation or to those wishing to apply control theory to specific organizational problems.
Control theory has a long history outside psychol- ogy. Many think it can have a long and fruitful history within the field of industrial and organizational psy- chology as well. How this conflict will play out in the field, only time will tell. If only we had a theory.
—Jeffrey B. Vancouver
See also Engineering Psychology; Feedback Seeking;
Goal-Setting Theory; Self-Efficacy; Self-Regulation Theory
FURTHER READING
Austin, J. T., & Vancouver, J. B. (1996). Goal constructs in psychology: Structure, process, and content.Psycho- logical Bulletin, 120,338−375.
Bandura, A., & Locke, E. (2003). Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited. Journal of Applied Psychol- ogy, 88,87−99.
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1998). On the self- regulation of behavior. New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.
Jagacinski, R. J., & Flach, J. M. (2003). Control theory for humans: Quantitative approaches to modeling perfor- mance.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Powers, W. T. (1978). Quantitative analysis of purposive systems: Some spadework at the foundations of scientific psychology. Psychological Review, 85,417−435.
Vancouver, J. B. (2005). The depth of history and explana- tion as benefit and bane for psychological control theo- ries. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90,38−52.
Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics; Or, control and communi- cation in the animal and the machine.Cambridge: MIT Press.