Verification of the Concept of Utilising Personal Computer Log Management Technology to Improve Employee Motivation

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly expanding the surveillance society, including offices. However, there remains a paucity of literature examining its effectiveness from the employee perspective. Regardless of how good the technology is, if employees do not accept it, it may decrease their motivation and deteriorate organisational performance. This study conducts a randomised controlled trial on personal computer log management in an online survey environment. The results reveal that, compared with laziness detection, which aims to identify people with poor performance or the culprit, performance detection, which discovers the true driving force, increases employee motivation. As employees are often dissatisfied with performance evaluations by their superiors, systems that evaluate potential performance receive high evaluations. In other words, fairness in the positive aspect of detecting hidden contributors is more important than fairness in the negative aspect of detecting laziness. Moreover, when considering each job, the same results were obtained for marketing and back office overall. However, in research and development, there was no change in the effect on motivation for either concept. Compared with marketing and back-office personnel, engineers have a high degree of specialisation and their roles are clear. Consequently, there may be less desire to detect potential contributors.