Introduction

For decades, the interplay of trust and control lies at the heart of understanding the effective functioning of workplaces (Long & Sitkin, 2018), and recent trends, such as digitalization or the ongoing deliberation of work have surely fueled it. Nowadays, the question of whether trust and control work as complements or substitutes is particularly relevant, given that the advent of smart workplace technology is quickly associated with the visible employee (Stanton & Stam, 2006), a panopticon of power inside workplaces (e.g., Bernstein, 2017) or leadership by non-living entities, keywords: Taylorism 4.0, Big Brother-like workplaces, or excessive monitoring-behaviors “down to employees’ underpants”.

In this talk, Schafheitle will address these matters and discuss questions of whether datafication technology-augmented control will necessarily be the new coercive of our times (Cardinal, Miller, and Kreutzer, 2017: 583).  In doing so, he will shed light on the transforming and disrupting impact of datafication technology on organizational control, as a means of employers to guide and motivate employees to act in desired ways. Secondly, he will then discuss how technology control can be designed and implemented in a way so that employees’ willingness to be vulnerable inside workplaces is at least not undermined but rather strengthened. From a methodological standpoint, Schafheitle  will adopt a configurational lens on trust and control and engage with rather novel empirical methods to the OB/management landscape, such as morphological analysis and qualitative comparative analysis.

Hybrid seminar

This will be a hybrid seminar. If you are interested in joining this seminar, please send an email to the secretariat of Amsterdam Business School at secbs-abs@uva.nl.