Over recent years, information technology has played an increasingly important role in the monitoring and surveillance of worker behavior in organizations. In this article, we take the position that managers, workers, and information technology professionals alike see worker-related information as a valuable organizational resource and that processes of social exchange influence how this information resource is controlled. These suppositions are woven together by joining two theories, information boundary theory, a motivational framework for examining privacy at work, and social exchange theory, which provides a perspective on social networks and social power. After discussing these two frameworks and how they might be interlaced, we analyze a corpus of semi-structured interviews with 119 managers, employees, and IT professionals that explored questions of privacy, motivation, and power in six not-for-profit organizations that were undergoing technology-driven change with potential for increased monitoring and surveillance.
As organizations' reliance on information technology (IT) continues to grow, the information technology personnel who support end users play an increasingly important role in the proper functioning of those organizations. In the present study, we interviewed information technology personnel (N=32) as well as other employees (N=89) to examine their intra-group and inter-group communications and assess the existence and importance of the occupational culture of IT personnel within organizations. We applied Trice's Occupational Subculture theoretical framework (1993) to examine the characteristics of the occupational culture of IT personnel and its relationships with other type of personnel within organizations. The results of our study suggest that IT personnel have established a distinct occupational culture within organizations, characterized, for example, by the use of technical jargon, primary value of technical knowledge, extreme and unusual demands on people in the profession related to the constant change of IT, feelings of superiority and a general lack of formal rules. Conflicts between IT occupational subcultures and other extant subcultures arise from cultural differences. ACM Categories: K.7.1
PurposeThe purpose of this article is to understand the relationship between emotional salience and workplace events related to technology change by using a combination of key features of two popular psychological theories – regulatory focus theory and affective events theory – to view the change process in diverse settings.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on analysis of 18 months of qualitative interview data (n=52 respondents) collected before, during and after the introduction of three different new technologies in three organizations – a hospital, a manufacturing facility, and a psychological counseling center. The mixed methods approach combined descriptive case studies and a structured coding approach derived from a synthesis of the two theories with which the transition processes at each organization were examined.FindingsEmployees with a so‐called promotion‐focused orientation were more likely to accept an IT change and the events related to it. Organizational cultures and the staging of events play a role in individuals' affective reactions and behavior. The use of the framework is promising for illuminating the role of emotions, the timing of change events, and subsequent behavior in response to organizational change.Research limitations/implicationsThe variety of types of organizations and job types represented, as well as the types of IT change proposed in each, provides a rich sample of diverse motivations and scenarios. Further development of the relationships between the timing of organizational events and regulatory focus is needed.Practical implicationsThe proposed framework suggests a shift in emphasis away from beliefs and towards emotionally relevant events. The findings suggest consideration of two distinct motivational aspects of both new and old technology. A peak in emotional events related to training indicates that an organization must actively manage how the plans, strategies, and communications with regard to training affect workers' beliefs and expectations.Originality/valueThe paper highlights how an emphasis on emotionally relevant events and attention to the regulatory focus involved in interpretation of those events could provide the basis for new approaches to organizational interventions. Interventions should focus on facilitating situations where individuals can frame relevant transition events with a promotion focus.
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