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Smart home cameras raise privacy concerns in part because they frequently collect data not only about the primary users who deployed them but also other parties -- who may be targets of intentional surveillance or incidental bystanders. Domestic employees working in smart homes must navigate a complex situation that blends privacy and social norms for homes, workplaces, and caregiving. This paper presents findings from 25 semi-structured interviews with domestic childcare workers in the U.S. about smart home cameras, focusing on how privacy considerations interact with the dynamics of their employer-employee relationships. We show how participants’ views on camera data collection, and their desire and ability to set conditions on data use and sharing, were affected by power differentials and norms about who should control information flows in a given context. Participants’ attitudes about employers’ cameras often hinged on how employers used the data; whether participants viewed camera use as likely to reinforce negative tendencies in the employer-employee relationship; and how camera use and disclosure might reflect existing relationship tendencies. We also suggest technical and social interventions to mitigate the adverse effects of power imbalances on domestic employees’ privacy and individual agency.
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The Power to Reward vs. the Power to Punish: The Influence of Power Framing on Individual-Level Exploration
This article adopts a relational perspective to demonstrate that characteristics of the dyadic relationship between supervisors and their employees are critical to understanding individual-level exploration—understood as the extent to which organizational members pursue new opportunities and experiment with changes to current practices. To this end, we introduce the concept of power framing—that is, whether the control over valued resources is emphasized as the ability to reward or to punish—and propose that supervisor power framing shapes employee exploration. In an experimental study, we demonstrate that reward (versus punishment) power framing increases employee exploration behavior and that this effect is mediated by perceived trustworthiness of the supervisor. In a second survey study, we replicate these findings in a field sample and show that the relationship between reward power framing and exploration depends on the degree to which the focal employee is sensitive to power characteristics (i.e., power distance orientation). This investigation advances scholarship on the microfoundations of exploration while also highlighting the ability of leaders to alter trustworthiness perceptions and induce employee exploration through power framing. Funding: This work was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award from the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [Grant 1943688] granted to O. Schilke. Additional funding was provided by the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1672 .
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943688
- PAR ID:
- 10516114
- Publisher / Repository:
- INFORMS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Organization Science
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1047-7039
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 346 to 363
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1672
