The impact of electronic monitoring on employees' job satisfaction, stress, performance, and counterproductive work behavior : A meta-analysis

Organizations all around the world increasingly use electronic monitoring to collect information on employees’ working behavior. To investigate the effects of electronic monitoring on employees’ job satisfaction, stress, performance, and counterproductive work behavior (CWB), we collected data of 70 independent samples and 233 effect sizes for this meta-analysis. Results indicate that electronic monitoring slightly decreases job satisfaction, r = − 0.10, and slightly increases stress, r = .11, supporting the notion that electronic monitoring negatively affects employees’ well-being and work attitudes. Moderator analyses suggest that performance targets and feedback may further exacerbate these negative effects on workers. Furthermore, maintaining and improving the performance of employees is an important justification of electronic monitoring. However, the current meta-analysis found no relationship between electronic monitoring and performance, r = − 0.01, but a small positive relationship with CWB, r = 0.09. These results question the benefits of electronic monitoring for organizations. Thus, decision-makers in organizations should pay attention to what ends employees are monitored. Beyond that, the current meta-analysis shows that laboratory studies probably underestimate the relationship between monitoring and employees’ job satisfaction, stress, and performance in field studies. In addition, current research on the effects of electronic monitoring lacks the examination of processes why organizations implement electronic monitoring and how electronic monitoring and work design are related to each other

Does Electronic Monitoring Pay Off? - Influences of Electronic Monitoring Purposes on Organizational Attractiveness

Applicants often take great care in deciding where to apply and may refrain from applying or accepting a job offer if they hear about privacy-invading practices at a future workplace. Based on communication privacy management theory, the present work examines how applicants react to different purposes of electronic monitoring. In a scenario study, we found higher privacy concerns and lower organizational attractiveness in a situation with controlling monitoring procedures as compared to supportive monitoring procedures. Furthermore, competitive participants evaluated only noncontrolling monitoring procedures more positively. This demonstrates that organizational attractiveness is harmed by controlling monitoring procedures, and decision makers should keep in mind how electronic monitoring is implemented, used, and may be perceived within and outside the organization

Executive Search Consultants' Biases Against Women (or Men?)

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in many countries. Since executive search consultants (also known as headhunters) act as gatekeepers in the hiring process, headhunters' biases might influence the female under-representation. There is preliminary evidence that suggests headhunters favor men, but direct evidence is missing. Thus, this study directly tested this assumption using implicit and explicit measures (an implicit association test and a gender role attitudes survey), completed by 123 German executive search consultants. Although neither measure showed an anti-women bias (with the explicit measure being compared to a match sample from a representative survey using propensity score matching), the implicit association test showed an in-group bias (i.e., male headhunter had a stronger association of men and competence than of women and competence). The latter is worrisome because the majority of consultants in this business are men. Thus, organizations interested in more female managers need to carefully consider who they hire as their executive search consultants

Executive Search Consultants' Biases Against Women (or Men?)

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in many countries. Since executive search consultants (also known as headhunters) act as gatekeepers in the hiring process, headhunters' biases might influence the female under-representation. There is preliminary evidence that suggests headhunters favor men, but direct evidence is missing. Thus, this study directly tested this assumption using implicit and explicit measures (an implicit association test and a gender role attitudes survey), completed by 123 German executive search consultants. Although neither measure showed an anti-women bias (with the explicit measure being compared to a match sample from a representative survey using propensity score matching), the implicit association test showed an in-group bias (i.e., male headhunter had a stronger association of men and competence than of women and competence). The latter is worrisome because the majority of consultants in this business are men. Thus, organizations interested in more female managers need to carefully consider who they hire as their executive search consultants

Is use of the general system justification scale across countries justified? Testing its measurement equivalence

System justification is a widely researched topic in social and political psychology. One major measurement instrument in system justification research is the General System Justification Scale (G-SJS). This scale has been used, among others, for comparisons across social groups in different countries. Such comparisons rely on the assumption that the scale is measurement equivalent. However, this assumption has never been comprehensively tested. Thus, the present two studies assessed the measurement equivalence of the G-SJS following classic measurement equivalence guidelines (i.e., multigroup confirmatory factor analyses) in Study 1 and using a new method for comparing larger numbers of groups in Study 2 (i.e., alignment optimization). In Study 1, we analysed the measurement equivalence in Great Britain (n = 444), Germany (n = 454), and France (n = 463). In Study 2, we used a publicly available dataset consisting of 66 samples from 30 countries (N = 13,495) to again assess the measurement equivalence of the scale. Results indicated (partial) metric equivalence, but not scalar equivalence in both studies. Overall, the studies indicate that mean comparisons across the examined countries are not warranted with the current form of the G-SJS. The scale needs to be revised for valid cross-country comparisons of means

Nuevas construcciones y trabajos de ampliación de la siderurgia Lohr, en Lohr-am-Main, Alemania

The geometrical properties of the hyperbolic paraboloid provided certain advantages to the architects, when they designed the new casting mill of the Lohr steel works, especially in regard to illumination and ventilation. Two similar hyperbolic parabolic surfaces, bounded by three straight and two curved edges, and joined together by a transition surface, form the top part of the ventilation dome. The northern elevation constitutes a skylight, of trapeze-like shape. Each of these domes, whose plan dimensions are 13.5 by 15 ms, rest on isolated supports, which, in turn, along the longitudinal direction of the nave, serve to support a bridge crane, with a 13.5 m span. The lower part of the nave has a height of 7.50 m, up to the springers of the roofing shell. The total height to the top of the dome is 16.3 m, so that the shell roof has a rise of 8.8 m. The statical behaviour of the roof was investigated on a reduced 1:10 scale model. As there is always excess heat inside the nave, there has been no need for thermal insulation. Advantage has also been taken of the high degree of waterproofness of high quality concrete, in order to avoid the need of applying any external waterproofing treatment. This project can be regarded as a significant contribution to current progress in shell roof construction.La geometría del paraboloide-hiperbólico ofreció una serie de posibilidades a los arquitectos—cuando diseñaron las dos nuevas naves de fundición de la siderurgia Lohr—para conseguir una perfecta ventilación y una buena iluminación. Dos superficies hiperbólico-parabólicas, exactamente iguales, limitadas por tres bordes rectos y dos curvos, se elevan para terminar en una pieza de transición, que forma la parte superior de la campana de ventilación cuyo alzado norte está constituido por un lucernario de forma trapecial. Cada una de las campanas, cuyas dimensiones en planta son 13,50x15,00 m, se apoya en cuatro soportes aislados, que, a su vez, y en la dirección longitudinal de la nave, sirven como apoyos de un tren de grúa móvil, de 13,50 m de luz. La parte inferior de la nave tiene una, altura de 7,50 m hasta los puntos de arranque de la lámina de cubierta; la altura total hasta el remate de la campana es de 16,30 m y, por tanto, queda una, altura de 8,80 m para la cubierta laminar. El comportamiento estático de dicha cubierta fue estudiado a base de ensayos sobre modelos reducidos, a escala 1:10. Como en el interior de las naves hay siempre un exceso de calor, no ha hecho falta ningún aislamiento en la cubierta; y aprovechando la gran impermeabilización que ofrece el hormigón de alta calidad, se ha prescindido asimismo de revestirla. En conjunto, esta, construcción industrial puede considerarse como una contribución eficaz al desarrollo de las estructuras laminares actuales

Developing a Psychometric Scale to Measure One’s Valuation of Other People’s Privacy

Researchers invested tremendous efforts in understanding and measuring people’s perceptions, concerns, attitudes, and behaviors related to privacy risks from data gathering by online platforms, mobile devices, and other technologies. However, technology users often risk other people’s privacy by sharing their data actively (e.g., posting photos taken at public places online) or passively (e.g., granting mobile apps to access stored contacts). Moreover, technologies that continuously sense the environment and record behaviors and activities of everyone around them (e.g., smart assistants) are becoming pervasive. Thus, an instrument to quantify how much one values other people’s privacy is essential to understand technology adoption, attitudes and behaviors related to collecting and sharing data about non-users, inform the design of adaptive privacy enhancing technologies, and developing personalized technological or behavioral interventions to raise awareness and mitigate privacy risks. This abstract details a preliminary study towards developing such as scale. We report the methods of generating the initial item pool and findings from a pilot survey. We hope to get feedback from the community to improve the research design during the poster presentation

A Psychometric Scale to Measure Individuals’ Value of Other People’s Privacy (VOPP)

Researchers invested enormous eforts to understand and mitigate the concerns of users as technologies collect their private data. However, users often undermine other people’s privacy when, e.g., posting other people’s photos online, granting mobile applications to access contacts, or using technologies that continuously sense the surrounding. Research to understand technology adoption and behaviors related to collecting and sharing data about non-users has been severely lacking. An essential step to progress in this direction is to identify and quantify factors that afect technology’s use. Toward this goal, we propose and validate a psychometric scale to measure how much an individual values other people’s privacy. We theoretically grounded the appropriateness and relevance of the construct and empirically demonstrated the scale’s internal consistency and validity. This scale will advance the feld by enabling researchers to predict behaviors, design adaptive privacy-enhancing technologies, and develop interventions to raise awareness and mitigate privacy risks

An open door may tempt a saint: Examining situational and individual determinants of privacy-invading behavior

Digital life enables situations where people invade other’s privacy -- sometimes with harmful intentions but often also without such. Given negative effects on victims of privacy invasions, research has examined technical options to prevent privacy-invading behavior (PIB). However, little is known about the sociotechnical environment where PIB occurs. Therefore, our study N=95) examined possible situational (effort necessary to invade privacy) and individual determinants (e.g., personality) of PIB in a three-phase experiment. 1) Laboratory phase: participants were immersed into the scenario; 2) privacy-invasion-phase at home: automatically and covertly capturing participants’ PIB; 3) debriefing-phase at home: capturing whether participants admit PIB. Our results contribute to understanding the sociotechnical environment in which PIB occurs showing that most participants engaged in PIB, that the likelihood of PIB increased when it required less effort, that participants less likely admitted PIB for more sensitive information, and that individual characteristics affected whether participants admitted PIB. We discuss implications for privacy research and design

Some Advice for Psychologists Who Want to Work With Computer Scientists on Big Data

This article is based on conversations from the project “Big Data in Psychological Assessment” (BDPA) funded by the European Union, which was initiated because of the advances in data science and artificial intelligence that offer tremendous opportunities for personnel assessment practice in handling and interpreting this kind of data. We argue that psychologists and computer scientists can benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration. This article aims to inform psychologists who are interested in working with computer scientists about the potentials of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as the challenges such as differing terminologies, foci of interest, data quality standards, approaches to data analyses, and diverging publication practices. Finally, we provide recommendations preparing psychologists who want to engage in collaborations with computer scientists. We argue that psychologists should proactively approach computer scientists, learn computer scientific fundamentals, appreciate that research interests are likely to converge, and prepare novice psychologists for a data-oriented scientific future