Prompt: How has cyber technology created opportunities for workplace deviance?

As we studied in the readings pertaining to cyber harassment and cyber stalking, the two biggest challenges in addressing “deviant” behavior are anonymity and accessibility. By “anonymity,” I mean that deviant behavior can be carried out by anyone with access to the internet, without necessarily having any means to identify the perpetrator. And by “accessibility,” I mean the fact that perpetrator and victim don’t need to to be co-located for deviant behavior to be carried out.

The word “deviance” has subjective meaning depending on the context, but for a workplace, let’s define “deviance” as “any behavior that causes undesired effects on productivity, team cohesion and morale, or the bottom line.”

Let’s consider a “deviant behavior” enabled by cyber technology that incorporates everything discussed so far: espionage.

A company discovers that critical, proprietary information has been sold to one of its competitors. They’ve identified five workstations that were used in the data breach, but after interviewing each of the five employees, there is still no more certainty about the identity of the spy than when the breach was discovered; it could be one of the five interviewed, or it could be a sixth person not yet identified as even a person of interest, or it could be someone outside the company. We just don’t know.

This deviant behavior was enabled by the things discussed at the beginning of this entry: the spy was able to act anonymously, and they had access to the systems and workstations required to exfiltrate the proprietary data. The discovery of the breach – the deviant behavior – has had adverse effects on everything mentioned in our definition of deviance:

• Productivity is down – the five employees’ access to systems is revoked or severely limited
• Cohesion and morale – teams work best when the team members can trust one another. The discovery of a spy sows discord, which in turn has an effect on productivity
• The bottom line – one way or another, the stolen information may wind up in the hands of competing businesses, affecting the bottom line of our business.