Some human resources and management leaders think tattling is on the rise. Bidwell’s theory about why it might be more prevalent now: paradoxically, the emergence of self-managing teams. In a 1993 study by James R. Barker, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, those working for a team of peers reported sensing a collective impulse for tighter self-regulation than when they had worked for a single boss. “Now, the whole team is around me and the whole team is observing what I’m doing,” an employee at a small manufacturing company told Barker.
“With his voice concealed by work noise, [the employee] told me that he felt more closely watched now than when he worked under the company’s old bureaucratic system,” wrote Barker in “Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly. “He said that while his old supervisor might tolerate someone coming in a few minutes late, for example, his team had adopted a ‘no tolerance’ policy on tardiness and that members monitored their own behaviors carefully.”