Are You Monitoring My Performance or Bullying Me?: A Framework for Patient Orientation

Introduction

Monitoring is an evaluation method that is used to observe the performance of the employee and to understand the return on employee investment for the company (Alder, 2001). One of the main reasons why employers believe in the necessity of monitoring is its ability to ensure employees’ job performance (Smith and Tabak, 2009). Through performance monitoring, work-related behaviors of employees are viewed, examined, and/or recorded with or without the help of technology (Stanton, 2000). However, employees may perceive it as a way of bullying or a threat to their personal area although the system is expected to have a positive effect on performance since control-oriented organizational culture is found to have a positive effect on employees’ organizational infringement concerns (Chang et al., 2014). Besides, there are some expectations like trust in monitoring systems positively affects employees’ commitment (Chang et al., 2014) or satisfaction from the system negatively affects the propensity to turnover (Chalykoff and Kochan, 1989). On the other hand, if the employees perceive the monitoring system as a secure tool for developing their skills, they have a more positive attitude toward the system (Chang et al. 2014; Wells et al, 2007; Jeske and Santuzzi, 2015) and accept it as a performance developing tool. It means positive results of monitoring will lead to a better relationship with customers.

As employees directly touch with the customers in service organizations, not only human resources managers deal with managing the employee behavior but also marketing managers need to spend time on this issue. Employees are one of the key elements of an organization for having satisfied customers. Considering the boundary-spanning role of service employees, interacting with customers can be used as a show-off for their job performance (Kalra et al., 2023; Yoo and Arnold, 2016). However, in the service sector, organizations must build and maintain a motivating climate to encourage employees to hold out a superior service value to the customers (He et al., 2011) and managers have to support their workers to create a favorable ambiance for customers (Drach-Zahavy and Somech, 2013). Even though investments in training technical employee increases the expectation for return, interpersonal relationships may affect the working behavior of an employee. A frontline service personnel who is aware of the technics of delivering superior service to the customer may turn into an unsuccessful one just because of the effects of interpersonal relationships with his or her co-workers, or the dominated climate and teamwork style in terms of task and goal in the organization. Thus, employee management needs a lot more than technical training so as to have preferred employee performance for superior customer service delivery.

In a human-oriented era, it is crucial for healthcare organizations to have satisfied patients apart from medical circumstances. Hence, the touchpoint personnel have a huge importance on patient-related organizational performance metrics. In light of this perspective, this chapter discusses the effects of employee monitoring practices on patient-related outcomes through patient orientation in healthcare organizations. It is suggested that the relationship may be affected by task and goal interdependence, and the service climate of the organization. This two-level model enhances the approach to administrative healthcare workplace, related to patient satisfaction.