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Spotlights on the conflict between employees and employers over electronic surveillance and the workplace. Stresses that between the help that advanced technology has aided firms and workers, has also come the feeling that employees’ rights of privacy have been invaded by employers’ constant monitoring. Comments on companies’ liabilities and confidential information, along with employees’ privacy and the effects of monitoring. Concludes that employers need to clearly define to what extent they intend to monitor the workforce.

Examines the utilisation of e‐mail scanning and surveillance technology by the management consulting business in the UK. Uses a questionnaire of UK management consulting firms to determine the uptake and substance of e‐mail policies, and the extent and nature of e‐mail monitoring implementation. Investigates the attitudes of management consulting employees towards e‐mail surveillance in a survey of work colleagues. Also considers e‐mail monitoring issues. Concludes that forms of workplace e‐mail monitoring are becoming more widespread. Awareness of the ramifications for worker privacy is growing, due partly to recent Government legislation. Finds that e‐mail policy adoption rates among management consultancies are comparatively low, as are levels of e‐mail scanning/surveillance software installation. Predicts that maintaining a fair balance between conflicting business and employee interests will be the key to determining the future direction of workplace e‐mail monitoring.

This conceptual article outlines the known effects of employee monitoring on employees who are working remotely. Potential implications, as well as practitioner suggestions, are outlined to identify how practitioners can create more supportive employee experiences as well as apply these to workplace health management scenarios.

This overview is based on a selective and practically oriented review of articles that hitherto considered the health implications of remote workers being monitored electronically over the last two years. This overview is subsequently complemented by a discussion of more recent findings that outline the potential implications of monitoring for remote employees, employees' work experience and workplace health management.

Several practitioner-oriented suggestions are outlined that can pave the way to a more supportive employee experience for remote workers, who are monitored electronically by their employers. These include the various health and social interventions, greater managerial awareness about factors that influence well-being and more collaboration with health professionals to design interventions and new workplace policies. Organizations would also benefit from using audits and data analytics from monitoring tools to inform their interventions, while a rethink about work design, as well as organizational reviews of performance and working conditions further represent useful options to identify and set up the right conditions that foster both performance as well as employee well-being.

The article outlines practitioner-oriented suggestions that can directly and indirectly support employee well-being by recognizing the various factors that affect performance and experience.

While many papers discuss the privacy implications of workplace monitoring, the purpose of this paper is to describe the positive aspects to voluntary monitoring in the workplace.

These aspects were identified through in‐depth qualitative interviews with employees of various organizations chosen for the invasiveness of their monitoring procedures. Specifically, the authors worked with individuals who had high‐level government clearances, working in information security (infosec), who were subjected to comprehensive monitoring both before being employed and during the term of their employment.

Through these interviews, the paper identifies four positive results of employee monitoring, four procedural issues that affected employee perception of the monitoring, and two secondary aspects that are specific benefits of holding a clearance, as opposed to benefits from the monitoring itself.

The research reported here is gathered from a specific sample: eight participants working at American infosec organizations. Thus, the results may not be widely generalizable to work environments, particularly for employees working in other countries where different monitoring requirements exist.

The contribution of this paper is the identification of positive aspects to voluntary monitoring as a condition of employment, the implication of which is that workplace monitoring can be deployed with positive results. The paper also identifies procedural aspects that organizations can address in order to improve employees' experience of being monitored. While preliminary, these results can be used to guide future research directions. Additionally, organizations that require employee monitoring can use these results to strengthen benefits to employees in compensation for their voluntary cooperation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate privacy boundaries and explores employees’ reactions in employee monitoring.

The research used the metaphor of boundary turbulence in the Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory to demonstrate the psychological effect on employees. The model comprised organizational culture, CPM, trust, and employee performance in employee monitoring to further investigated the influence exerted by organizational culture and how employees viewed their trust within the organization when implementing employee monitoring. Variables were measured empirically by administrating questionnaires to full-time employees in organizations that currently practice employee monitoring.

The findings showed that a control-oriented organizational culture raised communication privacy turbulence in CPM. The communication privacy turbulence in CPM mostly had negative effects on trust in employee monitoring policy, but not on trust in employee monitoring members. Both trust in employee monitoring policy and trust in employee monitoring members had positive effects on employee commitment and compliance to employee monitoring.

This research applied the CPM theory in workplace privacy to explore the relationship between employees’ privacy and trust. The results provide insights of why employees feel psychological resistance when they are forced to accept the practice of employee monitoring. In addition, this study explored the relationship between CPM and trust, and offer support and verification to prior studies.

For practitioners, the findings help organizations to improve the performance of their employees and to design a more effective environment for employee monitoring.

A research model was proposed to study the impacts of CPM on employee monitoring, after a broad survey on related researches. The validated model and its corresponding study results can be referenced by organization managers and decision makers to make favorable tactics for achieving their goals of implementing employee monitoring.

This study uses cross‐section and panel data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to explore contextual influences on the relationship between performance‐related pay (PRP) and organizational performance. While it finds strong evidence that the use of PRP can enhance performance outcomes, it also determines that this relationship is qualified by the structure of workplace monitoring environments. In addition, it presents evidence that managers learn about optimum combinations of pay system and monitoring environment through a process of experimentation. Finally, although there exists a robust positive association in these data between use of PRP and pay inequality, it appears that these higher levels of inequality carry no performance penalty.

Can market-based regulation based on consumer pressure and ‘independent monitoring’ serve as the basis for transnational corporation regulation? In an increasingly integrated global economy, many scholars and policy makers fear that mobile capital may force a ‘race to the bottom’; can independent non-governmental organizations and ethical consumers provide a counterweight to cost-cutting pressures? This paper compares three of the best known examples of transnational monitoring – the Sullivan Principles in South Africa, the Rugmark social labeling program in India, and the Commission for the Verification of Codes of Conduct's monitoring experiences in the apparel industry of Guatemala – to consider some common features of transnational monitoring.

This study forces respondents to tradeoff between invasive human resource practices and salary.

Respondents evaluated 16 calibration profiles to estimate a conjoint model among four categories: pre-employment, employment at the office, employment outside the office, and salary. Each profile included one level from the four categories.

In a study of mostly full-time employees, conditions at work were paramount. Salary was second followed closely by pre-employment monitoring. Monitoring outside of the office was a distance last.

In a tight employment market, salary may not be the deciding selection factor for employment.

Employee monitoring is advancing dramatically and making human resource activities commonplace and invasive. This study forces respondents to confront these practices and determine whether salary can compensate for their acceptance.

Electronic monitoring and surveillance (EMS) practices provide new challenges in the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between EMS in the workplace on employees’ trust in management.

This paper is based upon data from the 2012 Australian Electronic Workplace Survey of 500 randomly sampled employees. Controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, the data were analysed using OLS and ordered probit regression.

The regression analyses identified that EMS has, on average, a negative relationship with trust in management. The authors further differentiated the sample to examine the potential impact of EMS on trust between manual and non-manual employees. The study found the relationship between EMS and trust in management was only evident for manual workers.

Future research should investigate the extent to which employee attitudes, commitment and engagement are impacted, and the individual-level and organisational-level outcomes of EMS. Causal inferences are necessarily limited and the research does not address managers’ underlying motives. Although self-reported data on EMS reflect objectively measured characteristics of the organisation.

EMS can have negative effects on the employment relationship through the loss of trust in management, especially for manual workers. Tangible effects may flow from this through withdrawal behaviour such as employee exit from the organisation.

The findings of this study provide evidence to add to the debate on the extent and impact of EMS in the workplace and its impact on employees, the employment relationship and productivity.

Workplace surveillance is one of the most contentious issues facing employers, workers, unions, government and legal experts. However, little research has been undertaken on the effects of EMS on important job-related attitudes such as trust. The current paper remedies some of these deficits.

In recent years, electronic performance monitoring (EPM) has increased dramatically. The managerial decision to implement an EPM system is important for it has significant implications for an organization. Even so, little attention has been paid by researchers to this decision. The present paper reviews the published research on EPM and identifies factors that probably impact this decision. A model is offered to help researchers identify relevant psychological and organizational variables that may impact the decision to implement an EPM system. Psychologically, issues of trust, privacy, social facilitation, justice beliefs and stress reactions must be considered. Organizationally, a firm's Human Resource strategy, organizational culture, and anticipated consequences of EPM (i.e., increasing performance, reducing theft) are also discussed.