EMPLOYEES’ FAIRNESS PERCEPTIONS OF WORKPLACE SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING: PRIVACY INVASIVENESS, SMARTPHONE OWNERSHIP, AND EMPLOYEE WORK PERIOD

Abstract

Electronically monitoring employee behavior is a controversial practice that expanded with Internet and email access on work computers and now includes social media activity on smartphones. Employers insist that monitoring not only protects their business interests but also creates a safe working environment; however, employees argue that monitoring could easily violate their privacy and is detrimental to organizational fairness. This study measured perceptions of fairness of current employees when presented with different scenarios depicting workplace social media monitoring. Relationships between privacy invasiveness, smartphone ownership, and employee work period (accessing social media activity while on- or off-duty) and their effects on perceptions of fairness for monitoring social media activity were examined. Main findings include a negative relationship between perceptions of fairness and privacy invasiveness where fairness perceptions decreased as the level of surveillance became more invasive. Findings also support a negative relationship between perceptions of fairness and smartphone ownership, where monitoring practices were perceived to be fairer for employees who accessed social media using work-issued smartphones instead their personal devices. Lastly, a significant two-way interaction between privacy invasiveness and employee work period indicated that perceptions of fairness and levels of privacy invasiveness differ depending on whether employees access social media while on- or off-duty. Responses supported a low level of monitoring for off-duty employees but increased to a medium level for on-duty employees. In all cases, the highest level of privacy invasiveness, which was using monitoring software to detect and report social media activity, was perceived most negatively.