Exploring the Effects of Enterprise Instant Messaging Presence Information on Employee Attendance in a Distributed Workforce: An Ethnographic Study of a Large Professional Services Organization

According to John Adams' equity theory for employee motivation, employees place great importance on relative effort or input to its outcomes at the work place. However, as actual employee productivity is often difficult to estimate, anecdotal evidence suggests that employees frequently tend to compare the average number of hours worked per day. Geographically distributed or mobile workforces are of particular interest because such employees may not easily be able to physically observe their co-workers and, thus, estimate their relative effort. Instant Messaging IM has recently been adopted in many workplaces; yet, research on potential effects that IM presence awareness feature may have on employee attendance in a distributed workforce is virtually non-existent. This paper bridges that gap in the literature by presenting relevant findings, which have been derived from a 12-month-long ethnographic study of a large professional services organization. The authors show that, depending on the relative employee power relationship, presence awareness information may have significant positive or negative effects on a range of employee attendance dimensions.