Workplace Surveillance and Big Data: Contextualizing Digital Threats to Employees Moral Agency and Integrity

Big Data promises to make workplace monitoring more effective and efficient. This paper thus describes Big Data-based Human Resources (HR) analytics solutions and problematizes two ethical challenges that HR departments are faced with today: First, the cultural context that technology companies produce Big Data solutions in leads to biases and business models that influence analytics software in many problematic ways. Second, when HR analytics software is implemented within organizations, the quantitative logic of Big Data threatens to crowd out employees moral agency and integrity in favor of compliance and control. Therefore, we suggest that HR management requires increased ethical awareness, critical data literacy, and the willingness to have employees participate in value-sensitive design methods along every stage of the implementation process of workplace surveillance software.