Abstract
Employee electronic monitoring has grown dramatically in recent years, with new capabilities enabling increasingly invasive surveillance and control that could negatively impact worker well-being and organizational outcomes. This study develops a systematic framework for understanding employee electronic monitoring technologies' action possibilities (affordances) through a qualitative analysis of vendor materials and product documentation. Through analysis of vendor documents from 10 leading monitoring software products, the study identifies three hierarchical levels of affordances: observational affordances (focusing on surveillance and visibility enhancement), operational affordances (enabling automated decision-making and enforcement), and strategic affordances (supporting resource and compliance management). The analysis reveals how these affordances reflect varying degrees of automation and organizational control, from basic data collection to sophisticated behavioral analytics. The hierarchical affordance framework helps explain why identical monitoring features may lead to different outcomes across organizational contexts and suggests ways to design more effective and acceptable monitoring systems.