Looking to the Future of Monitoring


I feel like when some prisoners are braceleted so they know where they are. It s the whole idea of a loss of privacy in all of our lives. We have radar on the roads , and now you have radar at work. (Zweig & Webster, 2002)

New forms of employee monitoring are emerging ” those that do not relate directly to job performance. For example, new technologies are being developed to monitor and assess e-mail and Web-usage, and to enhance communications between geographically -distributed employees by capturing their availability information via video-based images (e.g., awareness monitoring; Greenberg & Kuzuoka, 2000). Despite the shift in purpose (e.g., from performance to non-performance tracking), the consequences of invasive technologies such as awareness monitoring and EPM are similar in nature.

Drawing on theoretical and empirical evidence from the EPM and system design literatures to develop a model of monitoring acceptance, Zweig and Webster (2002) manipulated the characteristics of an awareness monitoring system using relevant elements of Grant and Higgins (1989) and Carayon s (1993) frameworks. For example, participants were asked for their perceptions of the privacy and fairness of an awareness system that varied with respect to the degree of invasiveness and continuousness, as well as whether participants were offered knowledge of who was monitoring them and given control over monitoring. Furthermore, they investigated the influence of justifications for monitoring (e.g., to enhance communication and performance) on perceptions of privacy, fairness, and attitudes toward monitoring.

Zweig and Webster (2002) found that system characteristics that were less invasive and perceived as more fair, did lead to more positive attitudes toward monitoring. For example, offering participants control over the dissemination of their awareness information, giving them knowledge of who is using the system to determine their availability, limiting the frequency of image capture, and blurring their images resulted in more favourable perceptions of an awareness monitoring system. However, an important caveat to these results must be noted. Compared to when modifications were not available, modifying the characteristics of the video-based awareness system to respect individuals still resulted in low levels of acceptance and did little to mitigate negative reactions to the monitoring system. Reactions to privacy and fairness enhancing manipulations were only slightly less negative than conditions in which these modifications were not in place. In other words, respecting privacy and fairness led to statistically significant but practically meaningless differences in reactions .

In a qualitative follow-up study, a potential reason for these findings emerged. People felt that the awareness monitoring system violated their personal boundaries for how much information they were willing to share with their colleagues, regardless of the safeguards in place. That is, although the guidelines for respecting privacy and fairness resulted in slightly more positive attitudes toward monitoring, they did not fully mitigate negative reactions to the monitoring system.

Zweig and Webster (2002) suggested that the reason private and fair monitoring system characteristics did not fully mitigate negative reactions was because people still rejected the monitoring as a violation of their psychological boundaries. Drawing on research in clinical (Popp, 1996), social (Triandis, 1995), and environmental psychology (Linneweber, 1988), Zweig and Webster defined psychological boundary violations as a breach in the limits between the degree of psychological closeness and distance in interpersonal interactions. The researchers demonstrated that concerns about boundary violations were related to privacy and fairness perceptions with significantly greater frequency than concerns about the monitoring system characteristics. They concluded that while designing monitoring systems that respect privacy and maintain fairness is necessary, it is not sufficient to mitigate the negative consequences of monitoring. The use of awareness monitoring violates people s boundaries for the amount of personal information they are willing to share.

Returning to the original question posed in this chapter ” if the use of EPM also violates employee boundaries ” can we design an EPM system to respect boundaries and mitigate the negative effects of monitoring? In other words, can we identify the line between benign and invasive monitoring?




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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