Employee Perceptions of Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Multi-Level Analysis

Abstract

Research on Electronic Performance Monitoring (EPM) has taken an integrative perspective toward employee perception of the technology without consideration of the effect of organizational culture and specifically subcultures on the acceptance of an EPM system. There is a dearth of literature on the interplay between subcultures and how organizational mechanisms enforce a dominant culture to facilitate the acceptance of IT systems. In this paper, we address the gap through a differential perspective of organizational culture and its effect on the acceptance of EPM systems. We conduct a case study of two multi-cultural organizations: one in Qatar and another in the US, and examine the influence of the dominant culture on the design of the EPM system and how organizational mechanisms facilitate acceptance by the different subcultures. Our study demonstrates the importance of incorporating a subunit level of analysis when examining EPM systems and the different mechanisms that can help reshape employee perceptions.