EMPLOYEE MONITORING AND TRACKING

Employee Monitoring and Tracking

Employee Monitoring and Tracking

Introduction

As technology increasingly influences how we organize, structure and share information, our work environment is undergoing change. In a world where people work together across continents, time zones, and language barriers, technology unites but also challenges how we interact with one another and how managers assess their employees. An important repercussion of the pervasive nature of technology is its potential use to aid the assessment of productivity and performance; employee performance monitoring represents one such important feature of this change observed over the last four decades. While such monitoring has clear advantages in this new, technology-mediated and -driven environment, it also has implications for how employees perform. Three important performance indicators are organizational citizenship behaviors, turnover intentions, and employee reactions to feedback. While much research has been devoted to understanding the relationship between monitoring and performance at work, the mediating mechanisms are poorly understood and researched. Investigating such mechanisms is the primary focus of this assignment. Therefore, all the issues related to human implications of employee monitoring will be discussed in detail (Carayon, 1993).

EPM and Performance Indicators

EPM may have significant implications for a variety of employee intentions and behaviors. Current research links EPM characteristics to various performance outcomes. The positive or negative effects of monitoring may be the result of the characteristics of the task and the EPM system. The general consensus is that performance increases with monitoring. For example, monitoring employees has been shown to increase productivity in the case of simple data entry tasks. However, this relationship between monitoring and performance may be subject to various context factors associated with the task characteristics, EPM system support, and use of EPM data. Some studies using more complex tasks revealed that accuracy declined in the presence of EPM, affecting performance proficiency negatively, resulting in the discussion of the social facilitation effect being evoked by monitoring. When an EPM system is well designed and supported by employees, performance tends to increase. In addition, the negative impact of monitoring may be moderated if performance data are used in feedback sessions or appraisals (Griffith, 1993).

EPM and use of Feedback

A third behavior of interest is the likelihood with which employees adopt as well as use performance feedback. The researchers in 2002 noted that EPM systems can function as instructive communication media between managers and employees. As a result, the performance ...