Effects of electronic performance monitoring on personal control, task satisfaction, and task performance.

Abstract

Summary of Hypotheses The present study manipulated characteristics of anEPM system that have been the focus of recent legislativeand regulatory attempts. The experiment was designedto test effects of two related issues pertaining to controlin an EPM context. The first issue concerns the worker'sability to prevent or delay monitoring (called monitoringlockout). The second issue concerns whether the workeris made aware of monitoring specifically at each moment(called secrecy). The research measured effects of ma-nipulations of these characteristics on personal control,task satisfaction, and task performance of individualworkers. Personal control in this context is defined asworkers' sense of volitional control over aspects of perfor-mance such as work rate and speed-quality trade-off. Re-cords of workers' performance on a common office com-puter task served as objective measures of the quantityand quality of performance. In addition, workers pro-vided subjective reports of feelings of personal controland task satisfaction. Analyses of these measures wereconducted to test the following hypotheses:A worker's feelings of personal control will be affected bythe design of an electronic monitoring system. When theworker has methods to lock out (delay or prevent) perfor-mance monitoring, feelings of personal control will in-crease (cf. Aiello & Svec, 1993). (Hypothesis la)The worker's feelings of control will also be affected if thesystem informs the worker about the onset of monitoring(i.e., the secrecy factor). In accord with legislative and reg-ulatory activities, we propose that this knowledge of moni-toring will increase feelings of personal control. However,the directionality of this proposition is only equivocallysupported by research findings. Research on warning sig-nals (e.g., Averill, O'Brien, & DeWitt, 1977; Averill & Ro-senn, 1972) indicates that beneficial effects of such signalsdepend both on the nature of the threat and the availabilityof a coping response. (Hypothesis Ib)Task satisfaction will be positively related to feelings of per-sonal control (cf. Greenberger et al., 1989). Higher satis-