Electronic monitoring, trust, and turnover intention in the public and private sector

This study examines and explains the sector-conditional influences of electronic monitoring on employees’ turnover intention in the public and private sector. Drawing on survey data from a representative sample of the Norwegian working population, we employ conditional mediation analysis to test our hypotheses. Results show that institutional context matters for the influence that monitoring has on employees’ turnover intention, although employees generally favour productivity monitoring over time-use monitoring, and that employees’ perception of their manager’s/management’s trust in them is surprisingly robust to the presence of monitoring. The theoretical and practical implications from this research are discussed.