SUPERVISION
Employers can tow the corporate line, but they shouldn't tap it. Workplace surveillance appears to fail when employees suspect their output is being gauged.
Researchers gave 134 subjects the standard corporate spiel: quantity and quality are of equal importance. But while each subject carried out data-correction tasks, electronic prompts suggested they were being monitored for quality, quantity, both or neither. As one might suspect, productivity diminished when people believed they were being monitored for quality and vice versa.
Study coauthors Jeffrey Stanton, Ph.D., an assistant professor of information studies at Syracuse University, and Amanda Julian of Somerville and Company Inc., a Denver-based consulting firm, published their results in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. Stanton says his findings are applicable to video and electronic surveillance as well as computer monitoring, but that an efficient supervisor won't resort to any of these tactics.
