We investigate how emotion-understanding ability, a component of emotional intelligence, and tournament incentives jointly influence supervisors' propensity to acquire information about their subordinates' trustworthiness and tailor their control decisions to this information. We predict and find that when receiving piece-rate incentives, high emotion-understanding supervisors are more likely than low emotion-understanding supervisors to acquire subordinate-type information and use it in their control decisions. In addition, relative to piece-rate incentives, tournament incentives increase supervisors’ propensity to acquire subordinate-type information more for low emotion-understanding supervisors than high emotion-understanding supervisors. Taken together, our results suggest that hiring high emotion-understanding supervisors and giving supervisors tournament incentives are at least partial substitutes in motivating supervisors to acquire and, thus, use subordinate-type information in their control decisions. Our results offer important insights into the process through which supervisors make discretionary control decisions and contribute to the understanding of the forces that shape managerial controls within organizations.

我们调查了情绪理解能力（情商的一个组成部分）和锦标赛激励如何共同影响主管获取下属可信度信息的倾向，并根据这些信息调整他们的控制决策。我们预测并发现，当接受计件激励时，高情绪理解的主管比低情绪理解的主管更有可能获取下属类型的信息并将其用于他们的控制决策。此外，相对于计件激励，锦标赛激励增加了主管获取下属类型信息的倾向，低情绪理解的主管比高情绪理解的主管更多。综合起来，我们的结果表明，聘请高情绪理解主管和给予主管锦标赛激励至少部分替代了激励主管获取并因此在其控制决策中使用下属类型信息的方法。我们的结果提供了对主管做出酌情控制决策的过程的重要见解，并有助于理解影响组织内部管理控制的力量。