What’re You Looking At? Digital Monitoring Software and Effects on Employee Contextual Performance

Abstract

The advent of digital technology has been fundamentally transformative to the workplace. From remote work to instantaneous communication and the ever-increasing prevalence of machine learning, these tools force revolutionary updates across the professional world from management strategy to public relations alike. Traditional forms of employee evaluation in particular are experiencing a uniquely stressful situation in terms of adapting to this new environment. The framework for evaluating employees in an industrial environment, as put forth by groundbreaking research Frederick Taylor and is widely adopted today by corporate culture at large, relied on raw output as measures for productivity. Many early magnates including Henry Ford adopted his recommendations for boosting productivity to wild success. However, many criticized Taylorist methods of evaluation as being innately reductive, dehumanizing, and generally invalid in terms of evaluating the employee outside of performance alone. Critics pointed out that performance in a workplace went far beyond mere output, and thus different frameworks of performance began to emerge. One dimension in particular, contextual performance, rose in popularity as it was seen to measure performance outside the workplace’s assigned tasks, focusing more on how the employee contributes to the psychological and social wellbeing of the organizational unit. Contextual performance is seen as a more eclectic means of gauging how employees perform, often being considered suited for roles that are more subjective in nature. In the modern context, many managers are attempting to utilize digital monitoring technology (technology that tracks and automatically gauges an employee’s performance based on particular measures) to quantify more abstract notions of contextual performance, which are highly situational and circumstantial as the name suggests. With the digital monitoring software industry exploding combined with firms openly admitting to not implementing such software accurately, this thesis will look into how contextual performance within a particular task is affected by digital monitoring technology when its application is not necessarily appropriate for the particular task assigned. 4