Dataveillance in the Workplace: Privacy Threat or Market Imperative?

A Shifting Context

As profit driven organisations strive to manage their business in an efficient and productive manner, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect that such organisations would not avail of the obvious empowering benefits that communication monitoring technologies afford them. Furthermore it can be argued that they may in fact have legitimate reasons to monitor employee actions in the first place. However, an inevitable outcome of these changes is that employees’ relationship with their employers is changing in line with the changing balance of power in the workplace.

For an employee, knowing that their performance is being monitored and that that information may against them as part of performance assessment or promotion evaluation exercises, changes their perspective of the parameters of the employment relationship. Employee-employer relationships are typically perceived as being a two-way exchange, with the focus squarely upon the perceptions of reciprocal promises and obligations of both parties (Guest, 2004). These perceived obligations form a psychological contract that has been described as an individual employees’ “belief in mutual obligations between that person and another party such as an employer” (Rousseau and Tijoriwala, 1998: 679). In short, employees have implicit and sometimes unvoiced expectations regarding employee contributions, in terms of effort, loyalty and ability for organizational inducements such as pay, promotion and job security (Morrison and Robinson, 1997; Conway and Briner, 2002).

However, the monitoring of performance presents a threat to that previously accepted contract and indeed can be perceived as a breach of expectations by the employer, which in turn can lead to feelings of injustice or betrayal of employees (Morrison and Robinson, 1997). Employees’ reactions to contract violation have been shown to effect their organizational commitment (Lemire and Rouillard, 2005), work satisfaction (Sutton and Griffin, 2003), job security (Kramer et al. 2005) and motivation (Lester et al. 2001), as well as increasing their stress levels (Gakovic and Tetrick, 2003). Trust and fairness are core aspects of any psychological contract (Guest 2004) and workplace surveillance presents a considerable threat to the previously perceived trustworthiness and fairness of employers who now have the potential to leverage performance information against employees.