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The main aim of the research is to investigate the relationships among primary school teachers' perceptions on coworker social loafing, organizational justice and task visibility. It is also examined whether teachers' opinions on organizational justice and task visibility are statistically significant predictors of their perceptions on coworker social loafing.

Research was designed by using correlational survey model. The sample of the study consisted of 656 teachers selected by cluster sampling method among primary school teachers working in Eskisehir.

Research results showed that teachers' perceptions on their coworkers' social loafing levels were low, while their perceptions on organizational justice and task visibility were high. Furthermore, it was determined that distributive justice and task visibility predicted 13% of teachers' perceptions about their coworkers' social loafing levels. According to this finding, as teachers' perceptions of distributive justice and task visibility increase, their perceptions about coworker social loafing decrease.

This paper is unique in terms of examining the most probable antecedents of social loafing perceptions according to the literature among teachers which are organizational justice and task visibility together in Turkey context. The facts that social loafing studies are rare and hardly encountered among studies in the field of educational administration distinguish this study and make it appropriate to be published in a journal whose scope includes creation of an environment in which the management of resources provides the most efficient outputs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of asymmetric perceptions of task conflict (i.e. one person experiencing more conflict than the other) on the anticipated relationship with the partner, as well as subjective and objective performance.

In a 2 × 2 between-participants experimental design, we manipulated participants’ perception of task conflict (perceive task conflict vs does not perceive task conflict) and the perceptual conflict composition of their group (asymmetry vs symmetry). Participants were randomly allocated to each of the four experimental conditions. Eighty-four psychology students at a Dutch university participated (25 men and 59 women; average age = 21).

Results show that when individuals realize that they have asymmetric task conflict perceptions, they have lower expectations about having a positive relationship with their partner and perform worse compared to when they have symmetric task perceptions (i.e. both experiencing either low or high levels of conflict).

Past research on conflict has not often taken into account that individuals involved in a conflict can experience different amounts of conflict. By conducting an experimental study, in contrast to past research on conflict asymmetry, we can better understand the causal relationship between (a)symmetry of conflict and outcomes. We also provide insight into the mediating chain that examines how conflict asymmetry interferes with work processes and leads to negative work outcomes.

The need to integrate men and women more effectively into team roles requires a fuller consideration of the dynamics of work‐team diversity and the consequences for both behavior and cognition among team members. Drawing from sociological and psychological perspectives, this study examines the influence of team gender composition and gender‐orientation of the task on members' perceptions of their team's performance. The participants for this study included 216 university students (108 men, 108 women) who were randomly assigned to one of three types of gender‐mixed teams – male‐dominated, female‐dominated and balanced‐gender work‐teams. Teams were required to generate, in a (videotaped) team meeting, a negotiation strategy for two business‐related cases. Self‐report instruments provided information regarding perceptions of team performance, and expert judges offered objective measures of team performance. The findings of this study offer striking evidence that team gender composition and the gender‐orientation of the task, can clearly affect member perceptions of the quality of their team's performance, regardless of the actual performance level achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to explore effects of individuals' social context on their perception of a task, for better understanding of social aspects of task-based information seeking behavior.

This study took a qualitative case approach and conducted semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 12 participants. A cross-context comparative approach was chosen to identify effects of the social contexts on individuals. For comparative analysis, the research population was tenured faculty members in two different disciplines, natural sciences and humanities. The interview data were analyzed and coded using NVivo12 through an open coding process.

The results demonstrate that the same task type is differently perceived by individuals in different social contexts. Reasons for the different perceptions in the different contexts are associated with social factors of the disciplines, specifically social norms and practices.

This study uses a novel theoretical framework, cognitive sociology, to examine social aspects of human perception in relation to task-based information seeking behavior, which has been little understood theoretically and empirically in the field of information science.

Many e-commerce companies adopt a product customization platform offering various choices for customers to configure products to better satisfy their needs. However, a method to effectively measure customer satisfaction is lacking. This paper aims to investigate customers' perception of time in the online configuration process of customized products and seeks to propose time perception as the measurement of the effectiveness of online product customization.

An online laptop customization system was used in an empirical experiment to collect respondents' answers in a set of research questions. Regression and correlation analysis were conducted to investigate the factors affecting customers' satisfaction as well as the relationships with time perception.

The experimental results reveal several factors in customers' perception of time during the online product customization process. First, customers tend to overestimate the amount of time spent in a short-duration task but underestimate the amount of time spent in a long-duration task. Second, customers' perceptions of time are significantly correlated with their satisfaction with the configured products, and perceived time is moderately correlated with their satisfaction with the configuration process. Third, the difficulty of customization tasks and customers' motivation to process information also significantly affect customers' perceptions of time.

This paper advances the research on time perception by developing a new relative segmentation-based method to estimate the subjective perception of time. This study also makes several contributions to product customization research: the authors fill a research gap in the field of product customization by incorporating customers' perceptions of time into the measurement of customer satisfaction and by identifying the significant relationships among customers' perception of time, the ease of task selection, the customers' motivation to process information, and customers' satisfaction with customized products. These results aid in the design of online product customization systems.

This paper aims to examine three distinct aspects of authenticity that pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience when they engage with virtual classroom environments to develop their content-intensive instructional practice – task authenticity, student avatar authenticity and performance authenticity – and their perceptions about the usefulness of the simulated teaching experience to support their learning.

This paper explored these conceptions of authenticity and usefulness within a larger research study whose goal was to develop virtual environment tools to help elementary PSTs learn how to engage in one ambitious teaching practice: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation. To examine these aspects of authenticity and usefulness, this paper used a general qualitative deductive analysis approach to examine data from 104 interviews with 26 case study teachers and examined patterns in PSTs’ perceptions within and across interviews and authenticity aspects.

While these PSTs strongly value the utility of these tools to support their learning, findings point to variation in their perceptions of authenticity. Findings showed that most PSTs perceived the tasks as an authentic representation of the work of teaching. However, their perceptions of task authenticity did not always align with their perceptions of avatar or performance authenticity.

This paper argues that these three aspects of authenticity relate to, but expand upon, the broader notions of presence and plausibility noted in the literature on virtual environments and should be taken up more directly in future studies of users’ perceptions of virtual environments both within and outside of educational contexts.

Although internet growth has allowed producers to shift control of service transactions to the customer, little research has examined the effects of this shift. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the performance of different task types differentially affects consumer responses.

The paper is a field study using online data collection to examine the US Hispanic market, the fastest‐growing consumer group in the US as well as one of the fastest growing online user groups.

The paper finds that Hispanic consumers were less affected by the type of task than non‐Hispanic consumers, in terms of perceived quality, satisfaction, and intended patronage. Using constructs from the communications literature, task effects on three communication perceptions were shown to explain the differences.

The results provide support for the notion that more complex (transaction) tasks can lead to lower evaluations than less complex (information) tasks, while also providing some limiting conditions to this result.

The results in this paper suggest that services firms should consider, not only the environment in which the service encounter will be performed, but the type of service task, the type of consumer, and the potential interaction between them. As service organizations move from face‐to‐face to online service provision, they must consider how, online service provision is evaluated by consumers’, and how this affects patronage intentions.

The paper shows the usefulness of communications medium perceptions in explaining the interactive effects of service task and consumer type. It is pertinent to service providers, academic researchers, and consumer groups.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how frontline service employees’ (FSEs) perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can enhance meaningful work perceptions as well as help alleviate FSEs’ perceptions of verbal dysfunctional customer behavior.

The conceptual model is empirically examined through a survey of 306 FSEs of a large insurance company in South Korea and tested via structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that FSEs’ perceptions of CSR are negatively related to their perceptions of verbal dysfunctional customer conduct, which in turn is shown to be directly linked to emotional exhaustion. FSEs’ CSR perceptions strengthen their view that they are performing meaningful work (i.e. perceived task significance), which in turn strengthens their job satisfaction.

CSR has a preventive effect on workplace stress reduction, as FSE perceptions of CSR may help them cope with the emotional fatigue of dealing with dysfunctional customer behavior. CSR also provides a needs fulfillment effect, as FSEs’ perceptions of CSR foster perceived task significance and helps reduce their emotional exhaustion from work.

This is the first study to examine the potential impact of CSR within the context of FSEs’ boundary spanning emotional labor.

This paper aims to first investigate how unit pricing affects consumers’ grocery purchase decisions and perceptions of the shopping task’s information load. The second goal is to test how time pressure enhances the behavioural and perceptual effects of displaying unit prices.

Two on-line experiments were conducted using national samples of shoppers. In Study 1, participants indicated their choices and perceptions in an inter-brand shopping scenario where prepackaged products have conflicting positions on retail price and unit price. In Study 2, participants conducted the same shopping task but now under a condition of time pressure.

Study 1 shows that unit pricing shifts consumer choices towards the lower unit priced options and improves their perceptions of task information load. Study 2 shows that when consumers are under time pressure, unit pricing shows stronger effects on choices but not on perceptions.

The study comprised a fairly homogenous set of low involvement categories and relatively small assortments in a hypothetical purchase setting. Exploration of the role of unit pricing in more complex and more realistic purchase environments pose suitable avenues for future research.

This study shows that consumers benefit from unit pricing because it makes it easier for them to find the lower unit priced items and to more quickly complete their shopping task. Retailers will benefit from increased customer satisfaction and possibly an improved store image.

The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit pricing and that unit price information does not create harmful effects in terms of increasing their information load.

This study uses a specifically designed and controlled but nevertheless realistic grocery choice task to study the effects of unit pricing in an inter-brand context where there are only small differences in size and price. The study contributes to the literature by showing that in such conditions, unit prices help consumers compare the economic losses associated with product options. Their heuristic role is more pronounced when consumers are under time pressure. The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit prices.

The purpose of this study was to analyze, through a sequential model, the underlying mechanisms connecting transformational leadership with employee task performance. Specifically, it examined the causal chain of transformational leadership-job characteristics (task variety and task significance)-job engagement-task performance.

The hypotheses were tested on a sample of 320 employees and their supervisors from Spanish young technology and knowledge-intensive small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using structural equations.

The results show that the effect of transformational leadership on task performance (assessed by supervisors) occurs sequentially via task significance and job engagement. Additionally, job engagement mediates the relationship between task variety and task performance.

Findings highlight the relevance for supervisors to employ a transformational leadership style that leads employees directly and indirectly, through task significance, to be more engaged and achieve higher task performance. They also emphasize the importance of proper job design that allows employees to be fully invested in their job performance.

Despite the importance of leadership and employee performance for the survival and growth of these firms, the study of these relationships is largely unexplored. This study proposes and tests a serial model in which supervisor transformational leadership is linked to employee task performance through two sequential mediators: job characteristics (task variety and task significance) and job engagement.