Monitoring IT and Internet Usage of Employees for Sustainable Economic Development in Nigeria: Legal and Ethical Issues.

Abstract

Globally, organization system resources: hardware, software, data, and communication lines and networks are now handled with better interconnected and interdependent facilities because internet connectivity is widely integrated into ambient or ubiquitous environments through intuitive interfaces or “smart” interactions. Organization enterprises are increasingly becoming competitive, with widespread cyberloafing and lawsuits. Through IT and Internet usage, employees may compromise an organization’s confidential information, deliberately or inadvertently. Such concerns prompt companies to introduce employee monitoring to preserve the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of system resources, track employee performance, avoid legal liability, protect trade secrets, and address security concerns. Despite these laudable benefits, employees feel that monitoring is an invasion of their privacy rights. For this study, organizational ethics and major ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice representing the key ethical concerns for human subject protection in research were fully adopted as identified in The Belmont Report of 1979. In this study, the authors explored a narrative review, analysis, and synthesis of prior researches that focused on monitoring of employee IT and Internet usage. The authors also extracted peer-reviewed articles within the last five years from electronic databases, using some search keys such as “employee monitoring”, “legal and ethical issues”, “impact of employee monitoring on economic sustainability”, etc. The result of this study revealed that developing an acceptable monitoring policy will keep both employer and employee on the same page as to what is acceptable in the workplace along with what isn’t. This result may further explain the need for employee monitoring, address the legal and ethical issues involved when monitoring employees in a work environment, and provide strategies and practices for acceptable monitoring policy for improved organizational performance and sustainable economic development.

Keywords: Employee Monitoring, Legal and Ethical Issues, IT and Internet Usage. Economic Sustainability.

DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/9-5-03

Publication date: August 31^st 2019