Clarifying the effects of Internet monitoring on job attitudes: The mediating role of employee trust

The Internet is a fast growing mechanism for providing workplace monitoring. We examined how its implementation affects employees’ trust in the organization. We hypothesized that giving employees advance notice of monitoring and providing them a justification for it would enhance their trust. We investigated how employees’ perceptions of organizational support prior to monitoring moderated these relationships by conducting a longitudinal field experiment. We found that advance notice and perceived organizational support exerted significant main and interactive effects on post-implementation trust. In turn, trust significantly affected employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions.