Making sense of employee satisfaction measurement – A technological frames of reference perspective

Abstract

In consonance with increasing recognition of firms' ‘social’ bottom-line, we have witnessed scholarly and commercial advocacy for employee satisfaction measurement as crucial component of proper management control. Extant research, both within and beyond the accounting domain, has been characterized by functionalist-prescriptive viewpoints, to the detriment of a phenomenological perspective that illuminates how groups of actors interpret and enact the means and ends of employee satisfaction measures in situated and emergent patterns of use. We address this concern based on a qualitative case study investigating the application of an employee satisfaction measurement system in a large camping chain undergoing a post-merger integration. Our analysis highlights how the organizational role of an employee satisfaction measurement system is not determined a priori by its intended purpose or inscribed structural features, but subject to actors' sensemaking. We demonstrate how the ways actors make sense of an employee satisfaction measurement system can vary due to heterogeneous socialization backgrounds materializing in distinct frames underpinned by certain assumptions and expectations about the motives and uses of those systems. We discuss how such ‘frame incongruence’ can elicit unintended, and potentially dysfunctional, organizational dynamics and how these complexities relate to the “evocative gestalt” of employee satisfaction measures.