Dr. Gary Blau – Dr. Kyle Stephens | More Support, Less Surveillance: Exploring What Keeps Employees Engaged

Blau and Stephens felt that the traditional in-person workplace deviance measures could not fully capture what employees actually experience in this digital world, so they built new measurement scales.

Their measurement framework identifies three distinct patterns of what they termed “technology-based deviant work behavior”: time abuse deviance, that is time spent on unrelated activities like social media; communication deviance, for example digital communication that goes unanswered; and production deviance, such as using software to simulate activity while not actually working.

Testing this across two large samples of working adults in the United States across fully remote, hybrid and traditional in-person settings, the researchers found that time spent on social media behaviours were not driven by generation, and no single group was more prone to them than another. The temptations of time abuse deviance are universal.

What stands out most is what explained these patterns. It wasn’t a lack of discipline. Employees who were pushed back into the office against their preference, who felt unsupported by their manager, or who believed their employer had broken a promise, were more likely to disengage through technology-based deviant behavior. Blau and Stephens frame this plainly: people who feel let down by their organization are more likely to behave deviantly using whatever digital tools are in front of them.

This suggests that the answer to digital disengagement isn’t necessarily more surveillance software watching employees’ screens, but genuine investment in trust, communication, and follow-through from employers. Interestingly, the researchers also found that a little intentional downtime, a short social media break, for instance, was linked to higher job satisfaction for hybrid employees.

Rather than replacing existing in-person employee deviance measures, Blau and Stephens see their work as an addition: a way for organizations to further understand not just what employees do, but why, and to respond with support rather than suspicion in this digital world.

The researchers also looked at consequences, finding that employees pulling away from collaborative tools, that is higher communication deviance and production deviance, reported lower job satisfaction and were more likely to consider leaving their job, a signal of quiet unhappiness rather than open defiance. Focusing on hybrid employees, the technology-based deviant work behaviour measures explained additional variability in job satisfaction and job turnover intention even after the traditional, in-person deviance measures had been accounted for.

Organizations serious about retaining staff might start not with stricter policies, but with honest conversations about what employees need to feel supported.