鈥橳is the season to be not so jolly about long, stressful waits at airport checkpoints, and holiday travelers might be tempted to take their frustrations out on Transportation Security Administration workers. These travelers should hear what聽Curtis K. Chan聽(Management and Organization) has learned about the work woes of TSA screeners.
Chan has conducted a number of qualitative studies of how people experience and interpret their working conditions, and much of his field research has focused on TSA workers as well as their managers. His case studies involving the TSA, co-authored with Michel Anteby of Boston University, have appeared in top scholarly journals such as聽Administrative Science Quarterly听补苍诲听Organization Science, published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Air travelers may have the unsettling sense of being closely monitored, but so do security officers. Just before Chan and Anteby began their study in 2011, the TSA installed closed-circuit television cameras at all checkpoints鈥攖o keep watch on the officers. The agency took these measures not for reasons of national security, but in response to complaints by thousands of passengers that their checked-in bags went missing during screenings. Management suspected that airline staff (not part of TSA) were the more likely culprits but went ahead with the surveillance anyway.
Soon, the TSA鈥檚 use of the monitoring expanded. 鈥淲orkers believe that managers tended to go looking for anything they鈥檇 consider to be misbehavior, like reading a newspaper or checking your phone,鈥� said Chan, who based his research on interviews with 89 TSA employees and their managers at what is identified in the paper simply as a 鈥渓arge urban airport.鈥� Workers didn鈥檛 like it. 鈥淢any of them told us, 鈥業t feels like Big Brother is watching every little thing we do.鈥欌��
Chan said the screeners also kept saying something that seemed puzzling at first鈥攖hat they were almost never noticed. As he and his co-author came to realize, the agents were making a distinction between being 鈥渟een鈥� and being 鈥渘oticed.鈥� Chan explained that although they felt constantly watched, the workers also felt as if they were 鈥渘o longer noticed as distinct and unique individuals鈥攁s a person at work.鈥� He added, 鈥淭hey believed they were being watched for the kinds of things that could get them and anyone in trouble, but not for the good things they do, like helping a passenger at a stressful moment.鈥�
Learning from the TSA agents
, Chan and Anteby say the workers responded to the surveillance by engaging in what the researchers call 鈥渋nvisibility practices.鈥� The screeners took longer breaks and made extra trips to the bathroom, for example, just to sidestep the surveillance. They also increasingly avoided interactions of any kind with supervisors, believing that it was best to tread below the managerial radar.
The response by management was to ramp up the monitoring, thus triggering what Chan and Anteby describe in the paper as a 鈥渃ycle of coercive surveillance.鈥� In such a cycle, mistrust 鈥渟pirals out of control,鈥� said Chan, an assistant professor who earned his Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Harvard in 2017.
The study is focused squarely on the screeners and their work environment, not on the passenger experience. But when asked about the travelers, Chan said in an interview, 鈥淚t鈥檚 understandable that they would be frustrated waiting in line, but they should know that being a TSA officer is a hard job, harder than it seems.鈥� He pointed to a scenario in which travelers lash out at the officers, who, in turn, respond in kind鈥攖riggering yet another cycle of stressful interactions at airports.
And what about the managers鈥攏ot just at TSA but other companies that have increasingly resorted to surveillance of their employees?
Chan urges managers to be more mindful of the self-fulfilling cycle described in the paper, in which surveillance is interpreted by workers as coercive, leading to the invisibility practices, which then serve as a justification for further surveillance. He said managers could ask themselves simple questions like, 鈥淲hy are we doing this? What is the goal? And are we achieving our goals?鈥�
He added, 鈥淢anagers can also give workers a reason to interpret their surveillance positively.鈥� For example, management could initiate a dialogue with employees about the purposes of monitoring them, and it would help greatly if one real purpose was to develop their abilities as individual workers, according to the research.
鈥淣ot all organizations get stuck in this cycle, of course,鈥� Chan and Anteby聽. 鈥淎nd if managers can recognize upfront the unintended consequences of increased surveillance, they might help derail these dynamics. But they should expect that increased surveillance may also fuel the occurrence of invisibility practices.鈥�
Meantime, companies and everyone else can learn from the TSA workers, Chan and Anteby say in their paper, 鈥淎 Self-Fulfilling Cycle of Coercive Surveillance: Workers鈥� Invisibility Practices and Managerial Justification.鈥� The authors write: 鈥淭hey can teach us what the experience of coercive surveillance might look like for other workers and why such surveillance is likely to continue spreading.鈥�
William Bole is senior writer and editor at the Carroll School.