Ethics

This is a review of the article entitled Effects of Computer Surveillance on Perceptions of Privacy and Procedural Justice,  which examines how employees react to electronic surveillance in the workplace, specifically in terms of their perceptions of the impact on their privacy and perceptions of procedural justice. The article is by Bradley Alge and was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2001. The author is an Associate Professor of Management at Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University in Indiana. This paper came out of his PhD in Business Administration research, in which he wrote a dissertation entitled Electronic performance Monitoring and Control Systems (EPMCS) An Examination of the Roles of Organizational Justice and Organizational Privacy. This is in line with his current research interests, which includes information management, human-technology interaction, employeeemployer rights, and motivation. He currently teaches organizational behavior and human resource management at the graduate level (Krannert Graduate School of Management website, 2009).

he author argues that managements decision to implement a surveillance system is very important because it has considerable implications for an organization but that little attention has been paid to this decision even though many employees have negative feelings about monitoring. He notes that, from a psychological perspective, issues such as trust, privacy, and justice beliefs have to be considered. Therefore, the key research question asked by the author was what are the effects of electronic monitoring and control systems on privacy and perceptions of procedural justice From this the researcher outlined three hypotheses relating to (1) the impact of privacy beliefs on procedural justice beliefs, (2) the impact of relevance of the surveillance, level of employee participation in the surveillance initiative, and consistent administration of surveillance on privacy beliefs and procedural justice beliefs.

Based on the data collected, the researcher found that relevance and participation were significant in the study, both being inversely related to feelings of invasion of privacy and explaining a significant amount of the variance in the procedural justice construct. He found that effect of relevance on procedural justice was entirely mediated by feelings of invasion of privacy, while participation had both a direct (unmediated) and indirect (mediated) impact on procedural justice. Consistency was found to be significant in terms of explaining procedural justice construct but had no significant impact on feelings of invasion of privacy

I think this is a significant area of study for several reasons. First, the authors note that electronic systems provide various tools to enable managers to collect data and monitor employees, often without their knowledge. And currently, American firms can still monitor employees almost as much as they want and so a large number of organizations and workers are affected by this practice. Second, this question is important because the way in which such systems are implemented will impact their success and therefore this has implications for the organization. It is therefore important that managers consider various issues in implementing such a system because otherwise good intentions could lead to more harm than good. Research such as this one can provide managers with information on how to best set up electronic performance management and control systems, as well as providing information on potential areas that managers should consider when making these decisions. Based on the results of the research, Alge offered some suggestions in this area. He notes that when managers monitor job-specific activities and when employees are able to contribute to the process, then employees have less problems with being monitored. It seems to me then that the relevance of the monitoring and the level of employee participation in implementing the scheme are two things that managers have to consider if they want their surveillance system to work effectively with as little downsides as possible.