Missed Deadlines Lead People To Judge Work More Harshly, Study Says (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0175467937
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/11/14/067226/missed-deadlines-lead-people-to-judge-work-more-harshly-study-says
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/10/missed-deadlines-procrastination-psychology-study
> The study surveyed thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, executives, human resources personnel and others whose jobs included an element of evaluating others. Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as advertising flyers, art, business proposals, product pitches, photography and news articles. But first, they were told it was either submitted early, on deadline or late. "Late" work was consistently rated as worse in quality than when people were told the same work was completed early or on time. The difference was equivalent to including an objective shortcoming such as not meeting a word count.
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> A missed deadline led evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and they reported they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person in the future. "Everyone saw the exact same art contest entry, school submission or business proposal, but they couldn't help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was," said Maglio, who co-authored the study with David Fang of Stanford University.
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> Those who eagerly submit work early should be advised that this does not appear to earn a boost in opinion, according to the [2]report in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes . It also didn't matter how late the work was submitted, with one day or one week delays viewed just as negatively -- and that remained the case if the employee gave their manager advance warning. The latest study suggests that it is this inability to plan realistically that is frowned on, with factors beyond an employee's control, such as jury duty, not viewed as negatively. "If the reason why you missed the deadline was beyond your control, you as the employee should let your manager know," said Maglio. "That seems to be one of the few instances in which people cut you a break."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/10/missed-deadlines-procrastination-psychology-study
[2] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0749597824000578
Equate that to showing up late to work...... (Score:1)
Equate that to showing up late to work......and people like that always have an excuse ! And if that person is suppose to relieve you so you can go home, yup, that's a negative !!!
Sounds about right (Score:2)
As a teacher, when grading assignments: if everyone did the job in ten days and you had an extra day, then you had 10% more time, so I expect 10% better work. Otherwise how is it fair to everyone who delivered on time? With caveats of course, for extraordinary circumstances. But in my experience the students who asked for delays were often not the ones who had the hardest circumstances.
A natural sense of fairness (Score:2)
If you missed the deadline, it means you had more time to do the same work than the others, so to be fair, your work should be judged to a higher standard than the others. Because anyone who had done work with a deadline knows that missing the deadline is almost always caused by oneself delaying or putting off doing the work, rather than some real external factors.
Seems counterproductive. (Score:2)
If earliness has no advantage, then it won't tend to happen. If reduced lateness has no advantage, then there won't be any urgency to correct delays. And if supervisors are judging work unfairly based on absolute schedule rather than quality, they're telling subordinates to do a half-assed job and just avoid scrutiny.