Electronic monitoring in their own words: An exploratory study of employees' experiences with new types of surveillance.

Studied employee attitudes towards electronic monitoring such as email and web site monitoring in the workplace. 53 employed individuals (aged 20–59 yrs) responded to an anonymous, on-line, open-ended query about their experiences. Two issues were explored in the resulting data: the extent to which electronics monitoring shaped employees' behavior and the reasoning processes by which employees decided whether or not monitoring was a negative experience. Results of the analysis suggest that behavior is influenced by the capabilities of monitoring in combination with managerial expectations. An unexpected focus on sexual content on the Internet revealed that employees had assimilated managerial concerns about organizational reputation. Finally, employees' attitudes about monitoring appeared to be dependent, in part, on uses to which monitoring information was put. Appendices provide the survey instrument used and brief coding descriptions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)