Search results

Efficiency wage theory predicts that firms can induce worker effort by the carrot of high wages and/or the stick of monitoring worker performance. Another option available to firms is to tilt the remuneration package over time such that the lure of high future earnings acts as a deterrent to current shirking. On the assumption that firms strive for the optimal trade-off between these various instruments, we develop a two-period model of efficiency wages in which increased monitoring attenuates the gradient of the wage-tenure profile. Our empirical analysis, using two cross sections of matched employer-employee British data, provides robust support for this prediction.

We present a model of organizational monitoring that integrates organizational justice and information privacy. Specifically, we adopt the position that the formation of invasiveness and unfairness attitudes is a goal-driven process. We employ cybernetic control theory and identity theory to describe how monitoring systems affect one's ability to maintain a positive self-concept. Monitoring provides a particularly powerful cue that directs attention to self-awareness. People draw on fairness and privacy relevant cues inherent in monitoring systems and embedded in monitoring environments (e.g., justice climate) to evaluate their identities. Discrepancies between actual and desired personal and social identities create distress, motivating employees to engage in behavioral self-regulation to counteract potentially threatening monitoring systems. Organizational threats to personal identity goals lead to increased invasiveness attitudes and a commitment to protect and enhance the self. Threats to social identity lead to increased unfairness attitudes and lowered commitment to one's organization. Implications for theory and research on monitoring, justice, and privacy are discussed along with practical implications.

This conceptual chapter introduces an interdisciplinary model of emotional ambivalence using an adapted framework based on the Affective Events Theory (AET). Given the preoccupation in the current literature with studying affective disposition and discrete emotions, there is opportunity for researchers to explore the presence and influence of conflicting emotions. I use the organizational context of Personal Web Usage (PWU) monitoring to set the stage for a hypothetical discussion of the AET-based model of emotional ambivalence. The likelihood of conflict in the cultural norms and values associated with both monitoring activity and employee behavior presents an opportune setting to study emotional ambivalence. After an in-depth description of the model and its application to the PWU-based monitoring context, I conclude with a brief discussion of potential areas for future research.

While innovative work practices (IWPs), such as self-directed teams and performance related pay, have become commonplace in firms around the world, little is known about their nature and effects in emerging market countries. This study uses new data collected from face-to-face interviews with large samples of workers from two manufacturing firms in Lithuania in 2005 mainly to investigate hypotheses concerning the effects of IWPs on firm and worker outcomes. In these cases we find: (i) the range of IWPs is limited though particular IWPs, notably self-directed teams, are strongly evident; (ii) in view of the historical legacy, the incidence of some outcomes, notably monitoring, was surprisingly high; (iii) typically self-directed teams positively impact worker outcomes, notably job satisfaction and employee involvement, though effects on monitoring and effort are less frequent; (iv) typically equity ownership and bonuses do not affect worker outcomes, though positive impacts on effort and peer monitoring sometimes are found; (v) the evidence for complementary effects of teams and performance pay or financial participation is very weak. In the main, these findings do not support the mutual gains theory that IWPs positively impact both firm and worker outcomes.

In this chapter, we use the job demands–resources (JD-R) model (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001) and the transactional model of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) to provide a theoretical framework with which to examine information and communication technology (ICT) as both a demand and a resource. We review specific characteristics of ICT that may either increase or decrease employee stress and well-being. Specifically, we examine the extent that ICT increases accessibility of workers and access to information, the extent to which it improves communication and control over one's job and life, and the extent to which it is used to monitor employees or provide feedback. Finally, we examine the organizational, job, and individual factors that may mitigate or exacerbate the impact of ICT demands on individual outcomes.

There is abundant evidence that innovative work practices (IWPs) of various kinds, such as teams, quality control circles, no-layoff policies, job rotation, and employee ownership, have spread rapidly in developed market economies during the past thirty years or so. Between 1983 and 1993, Freeman, Kleiner, and Cheri (2000) report survey evidence that the number of nonmonetary incentive programs offered by firms increased by 500% in the United States. Similar trends appear to be at work in other countries including the United Kingdom, Japan (e.g., Kato, 2000), Denmark (e.g., Datta Gupta, & Eriksson, 2004), and Finland (e.g., Kalmi & Kauhanen, 2008). Whereas the corresponding evidence for transition economies is much slimmer, the available evidence is also suggestive that such practices are limited though spreading.¹ Unsurprisingly, both theoretical and an empirical literature have appeared to examine the impact of IWPs on both business performance and employee outcomes. As different scholars from diverse fields in the broad area of industrial relations have applied varying approaches to explore several research questions, those literatures have grown rapidly. At the same time, while it is clear that analytical work of the kind is becoming commonplace for advanced economies, work that focuses on developing and transition economies is very slim. As it is important to determine whether findings for firms in advanced market economies carry over to other economies, the first contribution of this chapter is to extend the geographical coverage of the empirical literature. This we do by assembling and analyzing new survey data set for a large Croatian manufacturing firm with our chapter perhaps representing one of the first such investigations for a former communist economy.