Impacts of Personnel Data Technologies

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The widespread availability of the personal computer, local area networks, and the-Internet in work organizations has fostered extraordinary growth in the collection of-personal information about workers. Increasingly, organizations collect and maintain data-such as test results and performance records using networked computer systems.-Organizations make these data available to a widening circle of organizational members for-multiple purposes.-The use of technology for collecting, maintaining, and distributing information about-workers raises numerous value-laden questions. Organizational need to know may-conflict with worker need for privacy, autonomy, and job security. These opposing-needs virtually guarantee conflict about what information work organizations should collect,-maintain, and distribute concerning workers.-This award allows the investigator to begin to work on two related sets of questions about this-conflict. First, what facets or features of these technologies do workers evaluate as most-important to their status, well being, and privacy? Second, what decision processes do-organizational decision-makers use when adopting and deploying these technologies? Grant-funding supports a pilot phase of literature review and theoretical development and an initial qualitative-study to collect case histories concerning the introduction of personnel data-technologies into organizations. Material from the qualitative study will be utilized to generate-survey items for subsequent studies. Results will sharpen the theoretical focus and methodological soundness of- subsequent studies of the knowledge and attitudes of-employees and the decision processes of managers in regard to personnel data-technologies. Further research would build upon these results by asking-employees to respond directly to management views, and asking managers to respond-directly to employee views. In this study, the potential for conflict between employee-and management perspectives would be explicitly assessed.-A final project would provide a longitudinal view of the introduction of a worker-information technology into an organization, to link changes in employee and manager attitudes to the introduction of a specific-instance of a personnel data technology.-