HAVING someone “peer over your shoulder” while you work doesn’t improve your
output—it’s official.
When Jeffrey Stanton of Syracuse University in New York and Amanda Julian of
Somerville and Company in Denver looked at how electronic monitoring affects
work performance, they found that employers’ efforts at improving output often
backfire. They asked 134 volunteers to carry out a data correction task on a
computer and told them their work would be monitored for both quality and
quantity. However, automated cues flashed up during the tasks that suggested
they were being monitored for quality rather than quantity, or vice versa.…
