Electronic Surveillance at Work

Abstract

This study examines electronic surveillance in the workplace, by asking, “Are such practices ethical?” To address this question, classical philosophical and modern psychological approaches to ethics are used. The inquiry begins with the importance of the problem, followed by its evolution and current status. After describing the method of analysis, the article analyzes arguments for and against surveillance. Although there are no easy answers, the “Discussion” section provides a synthesis of the findings and recommendations for best practice. The conclusion summarizes the study, notes its limitations, and offers ideas for future research.

Keywords

electronic surveillance workplace monitoring ethics

Introduction

Surveillance at work refers to the use of electronic technology to instantaneously and continuously collect, store, and report the behavior of employees.¹ The issue currently is not whether technology will be used to monitor workers (it already is). Rather, the focus here is on the ethics of how it is used, something that previously has not been done in a systematic manner. Indeed, ethics is often overlooked or submerged into other decision-making criteria. The results of the analysis can inform managerial best practices and advance the direction of academic research. The study, accordingly, uses ethical theory to examine arguments for and against electronic surveillance at work as several trends have converged to raise these concerns now.

First, people rely on electronic technology to communicate with others about work and to access job-related information. Because electronic communication and retrieval of data can be done any time and place, employees regularly perform work at places not owned by employers, and they often do so during “personal” time. As a trade-off, they handle private matters at work, using employer’s equipment. Along with this increased reliance on technology, and the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life, has come the enhanced capability to monitor. Today’s employers seemingly have the ability to follow nearly every move of employees. Yet, it is useful to recall that electronic monitoring, like any other organizational practice, is socially constructed: Technology can be an enabler of ends, both constructive and destructive (Schmidt & Cohen, 2013; Vorvoreanu & Botan, 2000)²

The purpose of this analysis is to examine this phenomenon. The background section reviews the extent, form, and goal of workplace surveillance. The core of the inquiry analyzes arguments for and against surveillance using classical philosophical and modern behavioral approaches to ethics, followed by a summary and discussion of best practices. The final section concludes the study, notes its limitations, and offers ideas for future research.

Background: Surveillance Extent, Form, and Purpose

Extent

Surveillance is pervasive and a critical part of modern information systems and work environments. Like the assembly lines of an earlier era, it allows management to monitor employee activities and productivity—but without the need of direct supervisory observation.

From 1997 to 2000 the percentage of major U.S. corporations that recorded and monitored employee communications and activities at work (e.g., phone calls, e-mail, Internet connections and computer files) doubled to 73.5% (Sarpong & Rees, 2014). More recent surveys by the American Management Association (AMA), U.S. News, and the ePolicy Institute, found that there was an increase in surveillance practices from 2001 to 2007 (the latest year available from such sources): An expansion in the percentage of employers who monitored website connections (from 62%-66%), reviewed and stored employee computer files (36%-43%), and blocked connections to inappropriate sites (38%-65%).

By 2007, 43% of organizations monitored emails, 12% reviewed the blogosphere for company-related posts, and 10% checked social networking sites for company-related content (e.g., text, photos videos; AMA & ePolicy Institute, 2007; AMA, US News, & ePolicy Institute, 2001; see also Mirchandani & Motwani, 2003). Productive and unproductive utilization of the Internet and networks can be determined and the cost of improper use calculated (Bupp, 2001; Sarpong & Rees, 2014). In short, monitoring personnel is not new, but the advent of sophisticated technology at low cost and small size (enabling concealment) has made it more intensive, extensive, and attractive (Kizza & Ssanyu, 2005).

Forms

Surveillance technologies can take many forms, including door swipes, computer log-in and activity reports, printer and photocopy details, and video recordings of staff comings and goings. Fingerprint, facial, and iris scans, as well as smart cards, are available to control access to facilities. Programs check computers for activities such as keystrokes, start dates, and down times. Software can be utilized to take frequent screen snapshots. Connections between terminals can be monitored to produce logs of the type and frequency of interactions. Apps surveil use of company-provided smartphones, and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices can track employees in employer-owned vehicles.

At call centers, software records call volume, duration of calls, and idle time for quality control purposes. The content of cyberspace dialogue, instant message usage, personal blog activity, and public postings can be retrieved. Deleting and encrypting messages does not insure privacy. Together these monitoring strategies create the “electronic equivalent of DNA evidence” (Flynn, 2009, p. 196).

Purpose

Increased reliance on the Internet and e-mail at work and their link to productivity, along with the desire to deter “cyber-loafing,” are spurs to monitoring. Organizations have bona fide concerns such as protecting secrets, curtailing theft, controlling costs, reducing absenteeism, ensuring security, maintaining workplace safety, and avoiding information leaks (Mujtaba, 2003; Sarpong & Rees, 2014, p. 217). Employers can detect whether workers are viewing games, sports, social networking, shopping, entertainment, or sexually explicit sites (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2013).

The costs of not addressing such concerns are substantial: Employee theft and fraud alone account for more than US$200 billion in losses annually (Pierce, Snow, & McAfee, 2013). With renewed emphasis on performance management, it is not surprising to see greater scrutiny given to productivity measurement and performance review, both of which are made easier by electronic surveillance. Furthermore, managers have a long-standing interest in reducing liability and ensuring legal compliance, objectives served by monitoring (Mujtaba, 2003).

To summarize, surveillance monitoring is common, takes many forms, and embodies not only abstract rights in conflict but also sparks debate in practice. It is used for a variety of reasons, and is likely to be most efficacious when employer and employee rights are carefully weighed. The methodology used in this investigation is now presented.

Method

Using the philosophical and behavioral perspectives discussed below, the ethics evaluation of monitoring draws on the large and growing surveillance literature.

A variety of decision-making models could illuminate whether electronic monitoring is ethical, but one is particularly helpful because its comprehensive scope reduces the chances of an incomplete assessment. This tool recognizes the competing emphases of three dominant schools of thought based on: (a) expected results of an action (consequentialism or teleology), (b) application of pertinent rules (duty ethics or deontology), and (c) personal character (virtue ethics). Derived from consideration of results, rules, and virtues, the ethics triangle integrates these distinct perspectives to furnish a balanced, defensible evaluation (see Svara, 2015).

Considering results, the question is, “Which policy decision produces the greatest good for the greatest number?” In using this lens, what is right is that which creates the largest amount of human happiness with the least harm.³ This cost–benefit, utilitarian approach is helpful for administrators seeking the common good for the majority of employees.

Contemplating ethical rules, the issue is, “Would I want everyone else to make the same decision that I did?” Rule-based ethics holds that certain actions are right (e.g., promise keeping) or wrong (e.g., inflicting harm), irrespective of predicted consequences; the end does not justify the means. This approach is useful because professionals are obligated to follow the principles found in the Constitution, court cases, laws and regulations, and organizational codes and policies (Rohr, 1988).⁴ What is right is what conforms to moral rules; one must see one’s duty and do it. In deciding what rule to apply, the person considers, “what is good for one is good for all.”).

Pondering the virtue ethics vantage point, one asks, “Does this decision improve my character and that of the community?” In virtue ethics, answers to the question of “What to do?” have little to do with results or rules and everything to do with what kind of person one is. Personal character is a guide to assessing the ethical advisability of a decision or action. Virtue ethics asks, “Does a proposed decision improve individual and community character?”⁵ It is a conscious recognition that inputs, not just outputs, are important to the success of the organization. Indeed, a person cannot be understood apart from the larger community in which she or he participates.

Variations and further claims of the three approaches are knowingly subordinated in the interests of parsimony and clarity. It should be noted that an overemphasis on one perspective, at the expense of the other approaches risks expediency (results-based ethics), rigid rule application (rule-based ethics), and self-justification (virtue-based ethics). In view of the limits of the individual approaches, it is apparent that this eclectic method can be worthwhile. Yet, behaviorists criticize the philosophical method represented by the ethics triangle for its failure to link moral theorizing and ethical action.⁶ As Gazzaniga (2008) observes, “It has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior. In fact, in most studies, none has been found” (p. 148). This suggests that other factors—unconscious biases, moral emotions, personal intuitions—are likely to affect behavior (Shao, Aquino, & Freeman, 2008).

Behavioral ethics, in contrast to these three philosophical perspectives, posits that to improve decision-making psychological factors that lead to unethical decision making should be considered (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011; Shafir, 2012). By examining psychological tendencies to explain human conduct, this school of thought introduces considerations like bounded rationality (human rationality is constrained by the situation and cognitive limits), decision framing (the manner in which a situation is defined can affect the outcome), herd behavior (in cases of uncertainty, people tend to follow the crowd and/or experts because they seem to know more), action bias (the felt pressure to do something), confirmation bias (gathering information that confirms pre-existing beliefs without objectively evaluating all the evidence), unconscious incompetence (lack of awareness about one’s own ignorance), overconfidence (overestimating the ability to make sound decisions), ethical fading (visceral responses become dominant and exclude ethical implications), and naïve idealism (the belief that one’s own view reflects reality and is shared by others; Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011; Shafir, 2012).

The heroic assumptions made by the traditional philosophical approach represented by the ethics triangle—that individuals are ostensibly and universally logical, possess full information, have the willpower to use it, and act in their self-interest—often do not hold in real life. Although behavioral ethics ideas are not necessarily new, what is new is the growing evidence that behavior is less under conscious control than previously believed. Feelings, intuition, and perceptions are at least as important in affecting behavior as logic, rationality, and calculation. For Bazerman and Tenbrunsel (2011), the goal is to be prepared for the unconscious psychological forces that routinely occur during decision making. The purpose of including behavioral ethics alongside the triangle is to increase awareness of, and account for, the blind spots found in human behavior in each of the points of the triangle.

Using “Ockham’s Razor”⁷ to cut to the essence of an argument, separate queries can be posed. Although the analysis here, integrating all three perspectives, may not provide conclusive answers, it provides direction by evaluating the logic by which decisions are explained. Individual ethical theories may lead to different evaluations of monitoring, but these differences must be assessed, not passed over. Neither the presence nor absence of monitoring is obviously good or bad, as both strategies can be, and are, problematic. To take into account employer and personal needs, electronic surveillance in general—the instantaneous and continuous collection, storage, and reporting of employee actions—will be analyzed using the three philosophical perspectives (the ethics triangle) presented, followed by comments from the behavioral perspective. The study consists in identifying the main positive and negative arguments concerning surveillance, as revealed from a thorough literature review using these key words: electronic surveillance, workplace monitoring, and ethics. The contentions are organized and analyzed through the lenses of competing ethical perspectives.

Findings

Although technology is often seen as inherently neutral (Alder, 1998), as Martin and Freeman (2003) observe, each technology in fact has “embedded values”; the decision to adopt a technology is a decision to adopt those values. And this is particularly clear in the case of electronic surveillance, as “the very fact that employers will track the communications of their employees places employer knowledge over employee privacy” (p. 360). Yet the “value-laden” choices do not stop there, as debate about monitoring depends on the organization and its members, the environmental context within which it operates, and the characteristics of the surveillance system and how it is implemented. There is both the promise of constructive contributions to organizational outcomes as well as the possibility of an oppressive work environment. Electronic surveillance can be regarded as a legitimate, impartial management practice serving the interests of both employer and employee or as an onerous technique serving the interests of the employer at the expense of the employee.

The analysis below focuses on general arguments and principles that can be applied to particular circumstances to test their relevance; case-specific details are important, but basic concepts and themes in the controversy are at least as significant. As will be seen the arguments raise salient concerns, but few are conclusive.

Results-Based Analysis

Consideration of electronic surveillance from the results perspective examines affirmative and negative arguments from the literature on the frequently cited grounds of (a) productivity, (b) risk management, and (c) privacy.

In support of surveillance

Advocates believe that technological advances provide an enhanced means to gather information about individual work capacity and performance. They contend that monitoring increases organizational control, facilitates in managing resources and workload planning, and aids in designing training programs—all of which enhances productivity. Surveillance enables frequent and timely performance feedback and helps enforce work standards to detect problems and assess employee behavior (Bates & Holton, 1995). Fazekas (2004) believes that if it is done properly, there are few incentives to abuse surveillance and, for liability reasons, important disincentives.

To optimally manage personnel, it follows that a certain amount of information about workers and their activities is desirable and necessary. In fact, employees expect to have their objectives set and information about their performance collected. As Gagne and Bhave (2011) argue, surveillance can improve performance when it is supportive of, rather than a drain on, personal autonomy. Accordingly, if management can advance a logical rationale as to the propriety and necessity of monitoring to improve productivity—and employees are involved in the design and control of monitoring systems—then employees may not see it as arbitrary or intrusive, but instead as serving the interests of everyone, organization and workforce alike.

Alder (1998), for example, reported an early study finding that General Electric increased customer call service satisfaction by the installation of a telephone surveillance system. More recently, advanced technology supplied evidence that high-ranking personnel at the Securities and Exchange Commission abused their Internet privileges rather than perform their jobs (Kidwell, 2010). Employees, then, may believe that surveillance is beneficial, or at least necessary, to reduce moral hazard.

Organizations also find monitoring useful as a risk-management tool to protect against security-accountability-liability concerns; as one survey revealed, two thirds of companies indicate that such legal concerns are very significant in the decision to surveil (Martin & Freeman, 2003). Thus, monitoring may detect employee use of work time and technology for personal use, theft of intellectual property, negligent hiring and retention, security breaches, viruses and worms, hostile work environment, dangerous work conditions, and fraud and embezzlement. Because employers can be held accountable for such harms, they have an interest in their prevention. In short, they have a need to know, as their ownership of resources warrants them to protect and control their property and to monitor its use. As long as surveillance is for a legitimate business purpose and personnel have consented to monitoring, it can safeguard both organizational security and employees.

The increased use of technological surveillance makes people more visible and traceable, raising privacy concerns. Most commentators agree that organizations are entitled to conduct surveillance for business reasons so long as it is not unduly intrusive (Flynn, 2009; Riedy & Wen, 2010; K. Rosenberg, 2008). Employee privacy rights do not eclipse the employer’s right to manage. Because employees use employer equipment at the employer’s place of business for employer purposes, they are presumed to have minimal privacy rights (Kidwell & Sprague, 2009). In health-sensitive sectors such as the restaurant industry, bathroom hygiene can be monitored using smart ID card technology as way to ensure compliance with regulations. Likewise, when theft occurs in locker rooms, monitoring may be desirable. Monitoring enables the prevention of problems and the discipline of wrongdoers.

Furthermore, sources of individual privacy—the Fourth Amendment⁸ to the U.S. Constitution, common law, statutory law—are limited in many ways (Knapp & Soylu, 2013) as there is no comprehensive federal law concerning privacy in general or at work. Thus, for instance, the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure) does not apply to business employees, although it can serve as a benchmark for private-sector decision making. Although many state constitutions contain privacy provisions, whether a person’s right to privacy has been violated depends on a reasonable expectation of privacy that does not erode the employer’s property rights. The upshot is that employers have legitimate interests in surveilling employees (Abril, Levin, & Del Riego, 2012).

In opposition to surveillance

The view that surveillance fosters good management is that there are few benefits in placing limitations on it. A different approach is to weigh the advantages of monitoring against the advantages of safeguarding employee rights by using the same productivity, risk-management, and privacy criteria.

The growth of surveillance technology has increased the potential for negative effects on the people subjected to it. Indeed monitoring can affect the employment relationship, giving more power to employers (Vorvoreanu & Botan, 2000), as organizations regard control of the workplace as a management prerogative. The extent to which such rights justify surveillance is open to disagreement.

Controversies arise, for instance, when monitoring goes beyond what is reasonable and necessary, when it demands exacting information about individuals, and when it compromises existing levels of control and personal autonomy to the point that it does more harm than good. Indeed the adoption of technology frequently means what can be done will be done, as technologies can exhibit “function creep” (Ball, 2010, p. 93). Contentious concerns include surreptitious data collection, how much data are collected, data interpretation, and use of data—that is, are the right things being measured for the right reasons?

In today’s “new workplace,” surveillance could be used as an “electronic whip,” allowing managers to increase the pace of work. Such concerns may be justified in light of “at-will” employment relationships, where most employees may be disciplined for any or no reason not contrary to law. For example, personnel can be terminated because of: e-mail comments about a superior, a log showing frequent bathroom use, or a program revealing excessive chair “wiggling.” (Boehmer, 1992; Ciocchetti, 2001) Critics believe that “all-seeing” technologies are a weapon to control and spy on workers” (Lee, 2007).

Furthermore, some psychological studies have documented the link between monitoring and fatigue, anxiety, depression and nervous disorders, and adverse impacts on health and productivity (Blackman & Franklin, 1993). Other effects can include increased suspicion, fear, distrust, resentment, and hostility in the workplace (Lim, 2002; Sarpong & Rees, 2014; Schulman, 2001). Such an environment negatively affects morale, increases stress, lowers motivation, one of the results of which could be worse productivity. When monitoring backfires, it can result in resistance, non-compliance, and retaliation. In a form of “reverse surveillance,” employees create counterinstitutional websites to report employer behavior for everyone on the Internet to see (Ball, 2010, p. 94). Skeptics also contend that there is no definitive evidence to suggest that productivity has decreased because employees may be using electronic devices for non-work purposes (Riedy & Wen, 2010).

In addition to productivity concerns, risk-management efforts may be counterproductive. Opponents contend that monitoring can have a detrimental effect on employee stress and anxiety when used to intimidate and punish people; it can also take the form of voyeurism, union-busting, identifying whistleblowers, and creating pretenses to discharge workers (Ciocchetti, 2011), which not only affect productivity but also the security, accountability and liability risk-management goals of the organization. Furthermore, consent to surveil is rarely given in the workplace (Ball & Margulis, 2011) as monitoring is simply installed and with no opportunity to opt out. When done without the knowledge of employees, its ill effects can be magnified once it is discovered.

Privacy as a basic moral right finds support in public opinion polls where an invasion of privacy is an important social issue (Alder, Schminke, Noel, & Kuenzi, 2007). Surveillance certainly holds potential to usurp individual privacy. The unequal relationship between employers and employees is exacerbated when critical components of privacy—control people have over their own confidential information and their control over the access others have to it—are subsumed by employers (Knapp & Soylu, 2013). Martin and Freeman (2003) opine that, “The privacy of employees does more than protect information; (it) is so integral to our identity and autonomy that it (is) a social good fundamental to our society” (p. 357). The dignity of, and the respect for, the individual is at stake.

Mere ownership of equipment should not be sufficient to defeat the expectation of autonomy as its loss creates feelings of vulnerability, violation, and shame, impinging on self-worth. Privacy is not just an individual right but also a societal good: The presumption of freedom and independence from being constantly watched and the ability to create one’s professional role in an authentic manner. Strong reasons, then, must exist to subject employees to surveillance.

The majority of employers monitor the activities of employees in some form and clandestine surveillance is widespread (Ciocchetti, 2011; Turri, Balasundram, & Hynes, 2008), perhaps because it can capture typical behavior. The premise seems to be that unless employees are regularly monitored, they will not act responsibly. Yet, Turri and colleagues (2008) argue that

[M]onitoring, especially if done in secret, can result in employees feeling that their employers are unfairly and unjustifiably prejudiced against them. Monitoring can even cause some workers to become less trustworthy, which will result in the need for even more monitoring—a “Catch 22.” Bupp (2001, p. 79) claims that “unrestricted surveillance deprives employees of basic human rights.” (p. 128)

From a results-oriented perspective, in sum, what is ethically correct is the consequence of an action. The moral implications of the dependency asymmetry between employer and employee suggest that surveillance should benefit both the productivity and risk-management policies of the organization and its workforce. The employer–employee relationship is negatively affected to the extent that surveillance does not respect privacy; it also fails to protect individuals as autonomous moral agents. Constant observation can be an assault on the ethical rights of workers.

Yet, an overemphasis on any single point on the ethics triangle is likely to result in an inadequate decision. Advocates may assume that they have found the common good for the majority of workers—at the expense of important rights. They might think that the greatest good is found, but perhaps it is simply because the conclusion is simply expedient. Opponents, in seeking the greatest good, may be vulnerable to self-serving behavior. In sum, looking at results shows that productivity and risk management are reasonable managerial interests, but that pursuing them through electronic surveillance can create privacy concerns in the absence of checks on its use. Therefore, specific limits on surveillance, such as disclosure policies, are needed. Attention now shifts to another school of thought.

Rule-Based Analysis

From a rules-based perspective the emphasis in the literature is on principles such as (a) fairness and (b) the commonweal in examining competing positions on surveillance monitoring.

In support of surveillance

Organizations have a duty to oversee their workforces to ensure employees meet their legal and ethical responsibilities to the employer. The more informed the organization is, the better decisions it can make in managing people. Information is power. Advocates hope to foster fair treatment of personnel and avoid capricious actions with the use of good management practices conducted in a balanced, humane manner. Regarding surveillance, organizations have responsibility to use monitoring to improve employee management by recording accurate, consistent, and impartial information. Indeed, the many diverse reasons for monitoring discussed earlier are aimed at maximizing employee productivity, quality, and safety whereas minimizing waste and inappropriate behaviors. Properly designed and implemented, surveillance promises fairness and objective administration of the employer–employee contract, ensuring procedural and distributive justice.

Adherence to best practice policies—employee participation in system design, employee knowledge of surveillance practices, electronic feedback supplemented with human interaction, developmental as opposed to punitive feedback (Alder, 1998)—can mitigate objections to monitoring. In so doing a safe workplace can be secured, preserving the benefits of surveillance not only to the organization, but also the commonweal as a whole. So long as there are checks and balances, social cohesion, and equity can be maintained. Most personnel grant the need for supervision and see surveillance as a means to securing mutual respect, fairness, and a sense of community.

In opposition to surveillance

Surveillance often overreaches, and is neither fair nor necessary in the name of the common good. As Ball and Margulis (2011, p. 115) observe, consent to surveillance is “rarely, if ever, freely given in the workplace.” As such, it “serves to perpetrate existing inequities and creates new ones.” Surveillance violates both the “golden rule” (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and the categorical imperative (“what is good for one is good for all”). “Managers would be reluctant to accept employee monitoring of all their communications,” Hodson, Englander, & Englander, 1999, p. 105) point out, “as a condition for employer monitoring of employee communications.”

Surveillance holds the very real potential to violate human rights by harming the quality of worklife, demeaning the individual, treating employees like property, and reducing them to interchangeable parts in the organization. Organizations are using electronic monitoring in much the same way that they used machines since the Industrial Revolution by routinizing jobs and robbing them of meaning (Alder, 1998). Detrimental to people, omnipresent electronic scrutiny reduces creativity and promotes a climate of distrust.

By extension, surveillance is likely to harm the commonweal as mutual respect is eroded. Adam Smith would object to monitoring because of its lack of sympathy, natural harmony, and generosity, generally failing to promote societal well-being and a healthy society (Hodson et al., 1999). In like manner, few individuals operating behind the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” would, a priori, approve of surveillance. Not only is there a concern for creating panoptic effects, but who monitors the monitors?

To summarize briefly, advocates see an ethical duty to ensure that resources are well-managed in the name of the organization and the community which it serves. When management involves subordinates in system design, combines electronic and personal feedback, and offers developmental assistance to the employee, many deontological concerns may be addressed. To the extent that it is improperly done, however, monitoring must be considered unethical from a rule-oriented perspective. Critics regard the duty to treat people as ends, not means to some supposed good; applied to surveillance, the obligation is to ensure fairness and contribute to a sound community. They see broad and deep surveillance policies as creating unnecessary harm to employees and society. Relying exclusively on rule-based analysis, in any case, could provide inadequate guidance and induce rigidity. Attention now focuses on the final approach, virtue theory.

Virtue-Based Analysis

A pre-eminent virtue frequently mentioned in the literature—integrity—is a product or synthesis of virtues such as honesty, moderation, justice, and the prudence to recognize moral challenges and respond. It is integral to moral nobility. Individuals of integrity are guided by principles, not popularity or expedience.

In support of surveillance

What constitutes good management practice in surveillance includes regard for personal integrity. Iedema and Rhodes (2010), for instance, suggest that monitoring makes for better employees as they may become more disciplined and work-oriented. Furthermore, innovative, empowering, and self-management techniques, such as Results-Oriented Work Environment, include oversight, but rely more on trust: Treated like adults, employees can do what they want, when they want, provided that the work gets done (Ressler & Thompson, 2010). In the pursuit of work–life balance, respect for the moral agency of a person can serve to mitigate the asymmetry in employer–employee relations. Indeed, when coupled with “open book management” that regards employees as business partners, not hired hands, surveillance can promote honesty, moderation, and prudence. Clandestine and/or abusive monitoring programs, however, are difficult to justify from a virtue ethics perspective.

In opposition to surveillance

Many managers, nonetheless, are reluctant to empower their charges and instead monitor them. Thus, for example, human resource principles are valued, but in practice they are not: Employers see employees as the most important source of growth in a company, but are ranked last as a source of growth in the next 12 months (Sewell, Barker, & Nyberg, 2012). Furthermore, ethics requires management to establish a sound surveillance policy, but even when accomplished, R. Rosenberg (2005) argues that action contrary to policy prevails. The workplace apparently precludes ethics claims, for an organization that seeks ethical surveillance as a matter of course has become a “rare and special event” (R. Rosenberg, 2005, p. 147). Indeed, deploying a surveillance system covertly indicates that the employer believes that employees lack integrity to perform their duties; such an approach does not contribute to human flourishing in the workplace.

When subjected to observation and control, Palm (2009) believes that individuals fail to act in concert with their true selves and at the expense of personal integrity. Rather than behave in accordance with their values and convictions, they engage in adaptive behaviors such as “manufactured” self, anticipatory conformity, and self-subordination (Brown, 2000). Electronic oversight is just one more attempt by management to extract from employees their knowledge of work, so that work can be routinized and workers are interchangeable if not replaceable. As such, opponents argue, personnel become unworthy of ethical treatment (R. Rosenberg, 2005). Employee behavior becomes rationalized and individuals are objectified, manipulated and devalued, denying them not only voice but also the necessity to regard them as moral agents.

From a virtue ethics perspective, in brief, the integrity and professionalism of employees focuses on supporting personal and organizational character. Responsible management will ensure that surveillance programs have measures to avoid or correct abusive practices. Yet, virtue theory’s strength—subjective judgments inferred from personal character—is also its shortcoming: If advocates and opponents of surveillance perceive they are good, they can be convinced that what they do is good.

Behavioral Ethics Effects on Surveillance Decision Making

Although rational decision-making models like the ethics triangle are clearly valuable, a relatively new approach—behavioral ethics—identifies significant shortcomings. This emerging field aims to make such traditional rational models more robust, rigorous, and practical by adding insights from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. Based on the actual behaviors of people, decision makers are not expected, like Homo economicus (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009), to have perfect information and to act rationally; rather, they are expected to be influenced by cognitive limitations and non-economic, emotional factors. Because almost no one operates with complete information, people “satisfice” by making satisfactory decisions that suffice at the time. Such suboptimal decisions can overlook important results, rules, and/or virtues. As a consequence, the decisions are characterized by cognitive illusions as they are frequently error-prone and biased.

In light of the unrealistic assumptions about rationality found in philosophical decision models, they cannot adequately describe, explain, or predict how people behave. Humans prefer to believe that they are like judges, conscientiously deliberating over the issues and arriving at reasoned conclusions after examining all the evidence; instead, they are more like lawyers, looking for anything that might help make their case. Human rationality is very much bounded by situation and human cognition. Individuals do not have complete information, and even if they did they have less-than-perfect capacity for information processing to reach an optimal solution. Bounded ethicality, stated differently, may result in otherwise ethical people making questionable decisions whether in support or opposition to monitoring at work.

Given the nature of many sophisticated surveillance systems, it is not surprising that decisions to adopt the technology may be flawed by behavioral biases. Thus, the definition of the situation (decision framing) may be affected by what other organizations are doing and vendors are selling (herd behavior), the desire to take action (action bias), confirmation bias (unacknowledged tendency in the collection of evidence to coincide with pre-existing views), unjustified conviction in their talent for good decisions (overconfidence and unconscious incompetence), emotional responses to tough moral issues (ethical fading), and beliefs that others share their views (naïve idealism). In a world of bounded rationality, people’s choices are embedded in their psyches and social norms, and such constraints matter. Thus, behavioral ethics can provide insights into workplace situations; for instance, a focus on productivity leads to unintentional ethical fading.

As Eldar Shafir observes, “People do not respond to objective experience; rather, stimuli are mentally construed, interpreted, and understood or misunderstood” and “Things that ought not to matter . . . often do, and things that ought to matter often fail to have an impact.” (as cited in West, Bowman, & Gertz, 2014). Stated differently, behavioral findings offer an alternative view of the individual as a moral agent. Although the rational approach (e.g., guided by the ethics triangle) posits the link between sound ethical reasoning and morally upright behavior, behavioral ethics provides a caution to decision makers, maintaining that interpersonal relations and emotion are crucial to understanding moral judgments.

Discussion

Responsible decision makers, by definition, are obligated to develop virtues, respect rules, examine results, and heed behavioral biases. Doing so, nevertheless, cannot produce a final, perfect decision for all seasons. Instead, a conscious attempt to reconcile conflicting values highlights a key function of policy making: generating alternative viewpoints, systemically evaluating them, crafting a considered judgment, and recognizing the necessity to consider behavioral constraints.

The approach enables the management of ethical ambiguity and provides help in making the inevitable compromises. When choices are guided by benevolence, creativity, and an ethic of compromise and social integration, there is at least the satisfaction that the problem has been fully explored and that the decision can be rationally defended. An integrated strategy that includes both philosophical rationalism and behavioral realism can facilitate achievement of that goal. The prescriptions found in the former and the descriptions of behavior in the latter contain contending arguments for and against surveillance. Taken separately, a single position may appear ethical at some points and unethical at others. The approach, accordingly, offers choices, not formula; it informs, but does not eliminate, the need for judgment; it does not weigh the relative weight of each argument. As a guide, the summaries that follow are depicted in tabular form in Table 1. The general assessment of these perspectives, using the ethical triangle and behavioral ethics, follows.

Table 1.

Arguments for and Against Workplace Surveillance Using the Ethics Triad.

	In support of surveillance	In opposition to surveillance
Question: Which policy produces the greatest good for the greatest number?
Results	(a) Productivity: Increases organizational control, facilitates in managing resources and workload planning, and aids in designing training programs; ensures impartial and fair administration	(a) Productivity: Some psychological studies have documented the link between monitoring and fatigue, anxiety, depression and nervous disorders and adverse impacts on health and productivity (Blackman & Franklin, 1993).
	(b) Risk Management: Protects against security-accountability-liability concerns; detects negligent hiring and retention, security breaches, hostile work environments, and so on.	(b) Risk Management: Monitoring can also take the form of voyeurism, union-busting, ferreting out whistleblowers, and creating pretenses to terminate workers (Ciocchetti, 2011).
	(c) Privacy: Employee privacy rights do not eclipse the employer’s right to manage; because employees use employer equipment at the employer’s place of business for employer purposes, they are presumed to have minimal privacy rights (Kidwell & Sprague, 2009).	(c) Privacy: The unequal relationship between employers and employees is exacerbated when critical components of privacy—control individuals have over their own private information and their control over the access others have to it—are subsumed by employers (Knapp & Soylu, 2013).
Question: Would I want everyone to make the same decision that I did?
Rules	(a) Fairness: The more informed the organization is, the better decisions it can make in managing people; properly designed and implemented, surveillance promises fairness and objective administration of the employee contract, ensuring procedural and distributive justice.	(a) Fairness: As Ball and Margulis (2011, p. 115) observe, consent to surveillance is “rarely, if ever, freely given in the workplace”; surveillance violates both the “golden rule” (“ do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and the categorical imperative (“what is good for one is good for all”).
Rules	(b) Commonweal: Most personnel grant the need for supervision and see surveillance as a means to securing mutual respect, fairness, and a sense of community; adherence to best practice policies (employee participation in design, employee knowledge of surveillance practiced) can mitigate objections while providing a safe workplace.	(b) Commonwealth: Erodes mutual respect; holds the very real potential to violate human rights by harming the quality of worklife demeaning the individual, treating employees like property, and reducing them to interchangeable parts in the organization
Question: Does this improve my character and that of the community?
Virtue	(a) Integrity: What constitutes good management practice in surveillance includes regard for personal integrity. Iedema and Rhodes (2010), for instance, suggest that monitoring makes for better employees as they may become more disciplines and work-oriented. Respect for the moral agency of a person can serve to mitigate the asymmetry in employer–employee relations in the pursuit of work–life balance.	(a) Integrity: When subjected to observation and control, Palm (2009, p. 55) believes that individuals fail to act in concert with their true selves and at the expense of personal integrity. Rather than behave in accordance with their values and convictions, they engage in adaptive behaviors such as “manufactured” self, anticipatory conformity, and self-subordination (Brown, 2000).

Neither surveillance nor its absence is problem-free. Looking at each point of the triangle in sequence, what then is the greatest good for the greatest number? As indicated, it may be realized when productivity, risk management, and privacy are enhanced to serve both the employer and employee. This implies that surveillance, initiated for business reasons, produces the promised results, and is not arbitrary or offensive. Although courts tend to defer to management, neither the organization nor the individual has absolute rights. The right to manage can be a seductive rationale for finding the greatest good, exceeding what is reasonable and necessary at the expense of important rights; if so, monitoring can be counterproductive.

The second component of the triad, rule-based ethics, focuses on what is good for one, is good for all. Properly designed, monitoring promises fair and objective administration of employment contracts, thus mitigating objections to being policed. Opponents, however, believe that surveillance often overreaches; consent is seldom given, violating both the Golden Rule and the categorical imperative, and creating unnecessary harm. Because few managers would consent to being monitored, the burden of proof—to establish a well-crafted system—falls on the employer.

Finally, virtue ethics seeks individual excellence and collective well-being. There may be no ready answers based on results or rules, so a person must act in a manner to enhance integrity in decision making. Surveillance advocates argue that monitoring can reinforce the professionalism of employees by emphasizing integrity and the imperative to better one’s self. Alternatively, the technology, especially when badly designed, can erode these same characteristics according to critics. In the end, virtue ethics demands a considered decision—neither excessive nor deficient—based on the situation and experience. As such, the choice to use monitoring must improve the character of the individual and the community in which she serves.

The drawbacks of each component of the ethics triangle (results: prediction difficulties; rules: rigidity; virtue: self-righteousness) highlight the significant biases and errors revealed by behavioral ethics. By anticipating these forces and deliberately considering their influence, a manager may ensure that they do not smother personal integrity, the categorical imperative, and the greatest good. The prescriptions of the philosophical decision-making model and the descriptions of conduct in the behavioral model, when seen as complementary approaches, furnish a more complete understanding of workplace dynamics. In essence, both ask decision makers to think about thinking. Organizations that incorporate a synthesis of these two models into their organizational cultures and ethics training will improve the quality of policy making.

To have authority is to be responsible for one’s actions. Surveillance, as noted, can benefit both employers and employees in the name of the greatest good, duty, and personal character, especially when tempered by behavioral ethics insights. Skeptics maintain that these very same standards can be compromised by monitoring.

Because the ethics triangle analysis as informed by behavioral ethics suggests limitations on surveillance, what are some guidelines to achieve a reasonable result? Every organization using computers, e-mail, and the Internet has the hardware to implement monitoring; accordingly, it needs to establish (or revisit) policies to ensure effective use. Sanders, Ross, and Pattison (2013) recommend strategies in accord with attention to results, rules and virtue ethics: articulating reasons for monitoring based on significant business justifications, obtaining employee consent, posting notices, training monitors to focus on job-related behaviors, and surveying workforce morale.

The policy should avoid adding to unequal power relations in the organization, a concern highlighted by both results and virtue ethical analysis. The decision to implement surveillance, for example, often does not consider the voice of those surveilled (Vorvoreanu & Botan, 2000). In the modern workplace, an imbalance between employer power and employee rights exists: Workers have few rights as “US law currently provides feeble protections to employees” and offers “a meager right to privacy” (Abril et al., 2012, pp. 95, 121). Monitoring is a tool that holds considerable appeal to management, one that should be evaluated for mutual organization–individual benefit.

Desai and von der Embse (2008) outline the parameters for surveillance by focusing on issues of fairness and advancing the commonwealth (duty ethics): What data are collected, how they are collected, how they are processed, what purpose they are used for, and the extent of the files’ impact. Conflict occurs when monitoring goes beyond what is sensible, demands precise information about employer behavior, fails to promote the social good, and when it compromises work practices. Notably, the lack of a company policy and the absence of audits of an existing program to ensure procedural and distributive justice, are problematic. Relying solely on the goodwill of the employer, as the analysis above demonstrated, is not sufficient.

Rather, the National Workrights Institute (n.d.; also see International Labor Organization, 1997) offers a model surveillance policy consistent with the ethical triangle assessment (and guidelines found in the extant literature) that recommend strategies germane to results: notification of monitoring, permits incidental use of company equipment, forbids secret programs, prohibits use in private areas, and excludes surveillance of personal communications and non-work areas.⁹

Conclusion

Monitoring has become ubiquitous in organizations, and the trend is for “more surveillance, more loss of privacy, more (workplace) restrictions, more control by management, and necessarily less concern with ethical treatment” (R. Rosenberg, 2005, p. 150). In addition, Ball (2010, p. 91) argues that there will be increased use of personal data, biometrics, and covert monitoring. As high-tech invasions of privacy generate indignation and litigation, courts and legislatures are likely to seek more sustainable policies. Yet, the underlying issue is not simply a matter of balancing surveillance and privacy. As Lynch (2013), observed, “To the extent that we risk . . . the loss of privacy, we risk the very status of autonomous persons.” Organizations should adopt monitoring programs that are suitable, not simply because they are popular. The triangle-behavioral ethics discussion here examined broad principles and arguments surrounding surveillance. That analysis may be helpful when decision makers apply them to specific circumstances to make informed judgments about electronic monitoring.

The work, like all research, has limitations. Perhaps the most important is that it relied on the existing literature to parse the ethical implications of surveillance. Although this study could serve as a benchmark for the ethics of monitoring, future research should update earlier employee surveys to reveal the current status of worker perceptions. To complement the breadth of such results, in-depth case studies would furnish a detailed understanding of the surveillance in organizations. Given the expanding pervasiveness of monitoring, its psychological and physical effects on the workforce (both individuals and groups), as well as its impact on long-range behavior, also need examination.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Jonathan P. West, immediate past managing editor of Public Integrity is professor and chair of political science and director of the MPA program at the University of Miami. His research interests include human resource management, productivity, local government, and ethics. Professor West has published nine books and over 100 articles and book chapters. Recent books are with James S. Bowman, Public Service Ethics (SAGE, 2014); Berman, Bowman, and Van Wart, Human Resource Management (4th ed., SAGE, 2012); and Bowman and Beck, Competencies in Public Service: The Professional Edge (Sharpe, 2010). Other books are co-edited with Bowman, American Public Service: Radical Reform and the Merit System (Taylor & Francis) in 2007 and with Berman, The Ethics Edge (ICMA) in 2006. He is the managing editor of Public Integrity. He taught previously at the University of Houston and University of Arizona and served as a management analyst in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.

James S. Bowman, the immediate past editor of Public Integrity is professor of public administration at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University. Noted for his work in ethics and human resource management, he is author of over 100 journal articles and book chapters, as well as editor of six anthologies. Bowman is co-author of Human Resource Management in Public Service: Paradoxes, Processes and Problems (4rd ed., SAGE, 2012) and Achieving Competencies in Public Service: The Professional Edge (2nd ed., Sharpe, 2010). His most recent book, with Jonathan P. West, is Public Service Ethics: Individual and Institutional Responsibilities (SAGE, 2014). He is editor-in-chief of Public Integrity. A past National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Fellow, as well as a Kellogg Foundation Fellow, he has experience in the military, civil service, and business.

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