When self-management and surveillance collide: Consequences for employees’ trust, autonomy, and discretionary behaviors

Despite arguments for the benefits of self-management for enhancing employees’ trust and willingness to put in extra effort for the organization, many managers fail to give their employees control and instead engage in surveillance to gain compliance. Drawing on personal control and reactance theories, we proposed self-management would relate to increased discretionary behavior – i.e., organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) – while the combination of self-management and surveillance would diminish OCB and increase counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We further proposed these effects would be mediated by employees’ perceptions of trust and autonomy. In a series of two studies, we establish the beneficial effects of self-management on OCB and illustrate the detrimental effects for employees and organizations when self-management and surveillance collide