from the employee (Adams, Scheuing & Feeley, 2000). The advent of computers has made electronic monitoring far more intrusive than just requiring that employees pay for their use of company resources. Monitoring of e-mail may be the most common type of electronic monitoring that goes on in the workplace. Some companies have installed software that prohibits employees from including language that can be construed as sexually harassing, but this software does not take context into account. Thus an e-mail sent to a corporate attorney discussing a harassment suit would be filtered by the software (Adams, Scheuing & Feeley, 2000).
Many employees do not understand the full extent to which their employers may monitor their e-mail communication, and when employees do learn about e-mail surveillance, research has shown that physical as well as emotional problems can result. In this way, electronic monitoring can actually hamper the very productivity that the employer seeks to boost through monitoring (Adams,
...