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An estimated 26 million workers are electronically monitored by organizations. Contradictory evidence indicates that such monitoring may lead to either positive or negative outcomes for both organizations and their members. This article applies theories of organizational justice and concertive control to account for these contradictions. It is argued that, when organizations involve employees in the design and implementation of monitoring systems, restrict monitoring to performance-related activities, and use data obtained through electronic means in a concertive manner by emphasizing two-way communication and supportive feedback, they are likely to reap positive results. However, when employees are not involved in the introduction of monitoring, when data gathered through electronic performance monitoring are used to provide coercive, obtrusive feedback, or when monitoring includes nonwork activities, the organization may experience negative results.
Organizations have evaluated and monitored their members for centuries (U.S. Congress, 1987). Concurrent with society's rapid transition to a postindustrial or information society (Mulgan, 1991), however, employers have begun using electronic technology to monitor employees. The various forms of electronic monitoring organizations employ include telephone call accounting, keystroke or computer time accounting, cards and beepers to monitor locations, computer file monitoring, screen sharing capabilities on networks, telephone call observation, and video camera observation (Fickel, 1991). These technological devices have the capability to record when a worker turns on or off a video display terminal (VDT), count key strokes by the second, time customer service transactions, track the number of operator errors (Nussbaum & duRivage, 1986), and provide managers with the ability to watch workers' every action without their knowledge (Marx, 1990). In essence, electronic monitoring capabilities provide organizations with panoptic power (Mulgan, 1991).
Although estimates of the number of monitored employees vary, most observers agree that the use of electronic performance monitoring (EPM) is extensive. For example, Nine to Five (1990) estimates that firms currently monitor more than 26 million workers, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimates that two thirds of VDT users are monitored (Nussbaum & duRivage, 1986), and the Congressional Office of Technology Assistance (OTA) believes that employers listen in on 400 million telephone calls between workers and consumers each year (Reynolds, 1993). These high estimates were more than supported by a survey of data processing, word processing, and...