How do Organizational Members Perceive Datafication Permeated Workplaces? Insights from an Explorative Single-Case Study

Datafication technologies increasingly permeate 21st-century workplaces and enable employers to transform artifacts of employees’ social and working lives into computerized quantitative data, promising to make organizational control more effective. Since these new technology control systems are scarcely studied empirical phenomena, this paper employs an explorative embedded single-case study to investigate how organizational members perceive these new technology control systems. The case study triangulates qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with leaders and employees, participant observations, site visits, as well as the state of the art of the literature on electronic performance monitoring and electronic surveillance. Results indicate that datafication technologies permeate workplaces in many and partly so far unknown ways. More precisely, the case reveals that datafication technologies autonomously enact various organizational control functions and develop their own momentum as they are perceived to divide formerly larger tasks into narrower work packages. However, this does not necessarily impair the trust of leaders and employees but points towards initial propositions of how the workplace context interacts with datafication technologies to make employees co-creators of datafication control. Hence, the insights invite decision-makers to critically revisit organizational design strategies in the realm of datafication to seize technological opportunities without leaving employees behind.