Digital Monitoring and Job Satisfaction: The Role of Job Characteristics

This paper investigates how digital monitoring in the workplace relates to employee job satisfaction, drawing on employee survey data from large organizations in Germany. We distinguish between two dimensions of digital monitoring: (1) the automatic storage of work-related data and (2) employees’ perception of this monitoring as constant surveillance. Results from linear mixed-effects regression models show that both dimensions are negatively associated with job satisfaction, with the perception of constant surveillance showing a stronger relationship. We further explore how three key job characteristics, i.e., job autonomy, supervisor appreciation, and perceived stress, relate to the association between digital monitoring and job satisfaction, as they may themselves be shaped by monitoring practices. We find that these job characteristics are consistently associated with job satisfaction and also appear to account for a large part of the observed negative association between digital monitoring and job satisfaction, with job autonomy playing the most influential role. Interaction models provide limited evidence of moderation, suggesting that the negative association between perceived surveillance and job satisfaction is somewhat stronger among employees with low autonomy. Overall, our findings indicate that minimizing perceptions of constant surveillance and preserving job autonomy are crucial to maintaining job satisfaction in increasingly digitalized work environments.