The Cost of Surveillance: How Perceived Invasiveness of Electronic Performance Monitoring Triggers Workplace Cheating

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of emerging digital technologies, human resource practitioners are increasingly adopting advanced electronic performance monitoring (EPM) approaches to ensure employee compliance and productivity. However, they have largely overlooked that the invasive EPM may lead to unintended, reversed outcomes, such as cheating. Integrating the self‐protection model of workplace cheating and fairness heuristic theory, our research aims to delineate how and when perceived EPM invasiveness triggers employee cheating. Through a field survey and an experimental study, we obtained converging evidence supporting our model. Specifically, we find that perceived EPM invasiveness leads to cheating via anger (a self‐protection emotion) and moral disengagement (a self‐protection cognition). In addition, overall justice mitigates the harmful psychological and behavioral consequences of perceived EPM invasiveness. This research contributes to the EPM literature and provides practical guidance to organizations on the effective use of performance management tools in the digital era.