Spying isn't always a good thing.(Brief Article)

IIE Solutions, March, 2001

Turns out that spying on employees doesn't make them more productive. In fact, a Purdue University expert on workplace surveillance says that electronically monitoring work may be counter-productive. "Most companies institute employee surveillance for one of two reasons: information security or to try to boost productivity as part of a quality improvement program," noted Carl Botan, professor of communication and a consultant to Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security "Unfortunately, a common issue with quality improvement programs, regardless of industry, is that improvement in invariably measured by quantitative data.

And when employees know they're being monitored, they tend to believe that the boss is more...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.