Events

Mr. Hanho Lee
Ph.D. Candidate
Fisher College of Business
The Ohio State University

Monitoring at work increasingly comes from peers rather than supervisors, yet peer monitoring does not by itself reveal why a coworker is directing evaluative attention toward their work. Extending the relationship-directed sensemaking logic of relational attribution theory, we argue that employees construe peer monitoring through dyadic attributions of caring or controlling motives. These attributions shape helping and incivility through relational uncertainty, while relational identification conditions how employees interpret peer monitoring, such that greater monitoring elicits stronger caring attributions at higher levels of identification and stronger controlling attributions at lower levels. Study 1 (N = 142 dyads), a three-wave field study, supports the predicted interactions and indirect effects through relational uncertainty. Study 2a (N = 256), an online experiment manipulating peer monitoring and relational identification, replicates the predicted interactions on motive attributions. Studies 2b (N = 117) and 2c (N = 114) manipulate caring and controlling attributions, respectively, and show that caring attributions reduce relational uncertainty whereas controlling attributions increase it. Together, the findings show that relational identification shapes the motives employees attribute to the same peer monitoring and that these attributions, in turn, produce divergent relational and behavioral consequences.