MEZIESBLOG

Introduction

The pressure to perform in the workplace is omnipresent (Mitchell et al., 2019) and increases even more when a person is immersed in a range of technologies that are seen as complex and cause employees to be stressed (Ayyagari, Grover, & Purvis, 2011; Tarafdar et al., 2010). The use of diverse applications and the increasing adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the workplace have changed working behavior (Hu et al., 2021). For instance, Meyer et al. (2017) studied ICT usage patterns among “heavy users” and found that the study participants collectively used over 331 different applications over a period of 11 working days. Even though the use of ICT can bring many benefits (e.g. increased access to information, as well as enhanced performance and productivity; Brynjolfsson, 1996; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000; Keeney, 1999), it may also have negative consequences, a fact which has been aggravated since the COVID-19 pandemic (Kalischko & Riedl, 2021). The workplace has undergone a significant transformation that results from increased ICT usage in organizational, social, and individual contexts. Organizations’ responses to this phenomenon of digital transformation have become perennial discussion topics (Gong and Ribiere, 2021).

The current state of research on digital transformation can be described as fragmented, spanning different approaches and views. This fact is illustrated by recent reviews, which have viewed digital transformation research from procedural (Vial, 2019), innovation and entrepreneurship (Nadkarni and Prügl, 2021), multidisciplinary (Verhoef et al., 2021) and organizational change (Hanelt, Bohnsack, Marz, & Antunes Marante, 2021) perspectives. Vial (2019) defines digital transformation as “a process that aims to improve an entity by triggering significant changes to its properties through combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies” (p. 118). The implementation of organizational information systems (IS) which offer the potential for EPM (e.g. enterprise resource planning systems, process mining tools or more specific monitoring software) could be viewed as an instance of digital transformation. However, it is questionable whether EPM use improves an organization, in particular, if viewed from the employees’ perspective.

Many organizations have been taking steps to transfer employees from working face-to-face to working remotely, and teleworking that depends largely on electronic communication is becoming the “new normal”, particularly as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hu et al., 2021; Society of Human Resource Management, 2021). This change has given the surveillance industry a new lease on life (BBC, 2020; Businessinsider, 2020; MIT Technology Review, 2020). The Guardian (2018) reported that EPM has become a significant privacy issue in companies. Similar reports can be found in other magazine and newspaper reports (New York Times, 2021; 2018; Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019). Such surveillance scenarios, which were already described by Spiekermann (2015) and other authors several years ago, are now increasingly finding their way into our everyday working lives and are therefore becoming increasingly relevant for research (Ball, 2021; Kalischko and Riedl, 2020, 2021, 2022; Ravid, Tomczak, White, & Behrend, 2020). The core focus of such systems is to monitor operational performance, with the ultimate goal to improve work performance.

However, EPM can be reacted to in a variety of ways by employees. They can, for example, accept the surveillance implementation and gradually lose their privacy, or they might resist and risk making themselves unpopular with the employer. Some employees express displeasure due to the use of workplace surveillance, leave the organization or engage in reverse surveillance (Watkins Allen et al., 2007). Studies already exist on the effect of EPM on individual performance. However, research shows a mixed picture (Aiello & Douthitt, 2001; Aiello and Svec, 1993; Bartels & Nordstrom, 2012; Becker and Marique, 2014; Davidson and Henderson, 2000; Goomas and Ludwig, 2009; Huston et al., 1993; Irving et al., 1986; Mallo et al., 2007; Stanton and Sarkar-Barney, 2003).

Although the use of technology to monitor employees experienced an upsurge as early as the 1980s (e.g. Irving et al., 1986) and is, therefore, a phenomenon that has been around for approximately four decades, the consequences of EPM on work itself, including employee perceptions and reactions, have not yet been systematically explored in detail and hence significant research potential exists (Ravid, White, Tomczak, Miles, & Behrend, 2022). Because the existing EPM literature is predominantly based on rather outdated technologies (e.g. cameras in working environments), and considering the fact that employee and user behavior have significantly changed during the past decade (e.g. more and more people track their own physiological parameters such as heart rate and behaviors such as steps per day or sleeping behavior), it is not surprising that recent articles made explicit calls for new studies on the consequences of EPM (Ball, 2021; Kalischko & Riedl, 2021; Ravid et al., 2020). As a direct response to these calls, in the present study, we develop a theoretical framework that uses perceived EPM as an independent variable and individual performance as a dependent variable. Moreover, the framework conceptualizes three different mediator variables: privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress. Based on a large-scale survey study in three German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland; N = 1,119), we tested nine hypotheses that we derived from our framework.

We are thus interested in exploring the assumption that perceived EPM affects individual employee performance, and that performance is also influenced by perceived privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress, which in turn are influenced by perceived EPM. Against this background, the current paper addresses the following research questions: Does perceived electronic performance monitoring influence self-reported individual employee performance? If so, is this relationship mediated by an employee’s perceptions of privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress?

The rest of this article is structured as follows: In Section 2, we present the theoretical background and develop a framework and the corresponding hypotheses. Then, in Section 3, we present the methodology. This is followed by a presentation of the results and the discussion in Section 4. Finally, we outline limitations, as well as possible avenues for future studies, and provide concluding comments in Section 5.