Is Someone Looking Over My Shoulder? An Investigation into Supervisor Monitoring Variability, Subordinates’ Daily Felt Trust, and Well-being

Abstract

Remote working has become the new norm in organizations. However, little is known about how supervisors’ monitoring affects their relationships with subordinates in remote work settings. Our research aims to enhance the understanding of the daily dynamics of monitoring and trust between supervisors and subordinates. Based on self-determination theory, we propose a multilevel theoretical model predicting that supervisors’ daily monitoring affects the extent to which subordinates feel trusted by their manager (‘felt trust’) and their subsequent daily exhaustion and vigor. Further, we develop the novel concept of supervisor monitoring variability and test its role in these relationships. We conducted two Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies (N=191, 1,417 data points for Study 1; N=257, 2,244 data points for Study 2) in different hybrid work contexts. Multilevel analysis findings confirmed that daily monitoring was negatively associated with daily felt trust, which in turn had a negative impact on subordinates’ daily well-being in both contexts. Furthermore, we found that monitoring variability intensified the negative relationship between daily supervisor monitoring and subordinates’ daily felt trust in the newly introduced remote working context, although not in a more stable context. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and derive a research agenda to study the daily dynamics of monitoring and its implications for organizations.