Affective governance theory: rethinking organisational control in digitally mediated organisations

1 Introduction

Digital technologies now mediate a substantial share of organisational coordination. Email, enterprise messaging and collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, video-conferencing systems, workflow and project-management applications, electronic performance monitoring, and algorithmic management systems increasingly organise how work is communicated, allocated, observed and evaluated. These systems differ markedly in technical function. Yet when they become recurrent components of everyday work, they also alter the social and psychological conditions under which employees decide when to respond, remain visible, participate and disengage (Kellogg et al., 2020; Leonardi, 2021; Parker and Grote, 2022). This paper uses the term digital work infrastructure to refer to work-facing digital systems whose repeated use materially mediates one or more of four organisational functions: communication, coordination, visibility or evaluation. A digitally mediated organisation is therefore an organisation in which a meaningful proportion of routine work is recurrently coordinated, made visible or evaluated through such infrastructures. The category is functional rather than brand-specific. Email, an intranet, Zoom, Teams, Slack or a workflow application falls within the scope only to the extent that it repeatedly mediates organisationally consequential work. Public social-media platforms are included only when they are integrated into work coordination, professional visibility or evaluation. Occasional administrative technologies and purely private digital use fall outside the theory's primary scope. The behavioural consequences of these infrastructures are not theoretically underexplored. Affordance research demonstrates that digital technologies enable visibility, persistence, editability and association in ways that reshape organisational communication (Treem and Leonardi, 2012). Sociomaterial scholarship shows that technology and organising become entangled in practice (Leonardi, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007). Algorithmic-control research explains how organisations direct, evaluate and discipline workers through technologically mediated restriction, recommendation, recording, rating, replacement and reward (Kellogg et al., 2020), while studies of platform work show how information asymmetries can enable indirect control (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Wood et al., 2019). Research on digital nudging and persuasive technology further demonstrates that interface design can guide judgement and behaviour, including in workplace settings where direct supervision is absent (Weinmann et al., 2016; Wenker, 2022). Electronic performance-monitoring scholarship similarly establishes visibility and perceived observation as consequential control mechanisms (Ravid et al., 2020, 2023).

The theoretical problem is therefore not whether digital environments shape employee behaviour. That proposition is already well supported. The more precise problem concerns the conversion of heterogeneous digital features into an organisational environment in which responsiveness, visibility or participation acquires affective and evaluative force. The same presence indicator, read receipt or response timestamp can be largely informational in one organisation and psychologically compelling in another. A discrete notification can function as a neutral cue, an explicit nudge, evidence of surveillance, or a signal that one's professional standing may be at stake. Existing literatures explain important parts of these dynamics, but they locate the principal mechanism in affordance enactment, choice architecture, data-driven direction or evaluation, perceived monitoring, internalised norms, or other established control forms. Less developed is a configurational account of when recurrent digital cues become linked to norms and affectively charged as a relatively stable governance environment, and how that environment sustains self-regulation across episodes even when no specific algorithmic command, incentive or act of observation is present.

Affective Governance Theory (AGT) is formulated in this paper to address that narrower theoretical problem. AGT is a new mid-range theory of organisational control, not an established theory imported from prior literature. It proposes that a digital work infrastructure becomes an affective configuration when repeated interaction with technologically enabled cues is linked to local norms and anticipated organisational consequences strongly enough for those cues to acquire stable affective and evaluative significance. Affective configuration is therefore not a synonym for a digital platform or sociotechnical environment. It is an emergent organisational configuration that makes some forms of conduct feel immediately safer, more appropriate or more professionally necessary than alternatives.

AGT explains this process through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms. Affective inscription describes how recurrent digital cues acquire affective and evaluative valence through repeated linkage with organisational meanings. Anticipatory self-regulation describes rapid behavioural adjustment organised around expected relational or professional consequences before, or alongside, deliberate appraisal. The moral economy of digital presence describes the collective valuation through which responsiveness and visibility become markers of commitment, professionalism or belonging. These mechanisms do not displace established control mechanisms. They specify how existing technical and normative conditions can become affectively organised and recursively reproduced in everyday digital work.

The theory makes four contributions. First, it provides a discriminant construct, affective configuration, and specifies the conditions under which an ordinary sociotechnical environment becomes such a configuration. Second, it repositions affect from an outcome of work to part of the generative mechanism of organisational control, while avoiding a claim that behaviour occurs without cognition or agency. Third, it integrates adjacent digital-control literatures without recasting their established mechanisms as novel, thereby locating AGT's contribution in configuration, conversion and recursive reproduction. Fourth, it connects digital governance to sustainable work by showing how apparently efficient coordination may transfer organisational costs into chronic availability, self-monitoring and impaired recovery. The paper develops these claims through an explicit abductive conceptual procedure, delineates boundary conditions and discriminant predictions, and concludes with an actionable organisational diagnostic.

2 Conceptual approach and theory-development procedure

2.1 Conceptual design and abductive logic

This is a conceptual theory-building paper rather than a systematic literature review. Its purpose is to construct a mid-range explanatory model for a defined organisational phenomenon. Consistent with guidance for conceptual model papers, the value of the exercise depends on making explicit the logic through which literatures are selected, compared and transformed into theoretical relationships (Jaakkola, 2020). The design is abductive because theory development begins from an explanatory anomaly and proceeds through iterative movement between the phenomenon and plausible theoretical explanations, seeking an account that is both more precise and more discriminating than the initial framing (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012).

The explanatory anomaly is not that employees respond to digital technologies. Rather, it is that similar technical features can acquire sharply different behavioural force across organisational settings and that responsiveness or visibility may continue to organise conduct across repeated work episodes without a contemporaneous instruction, reward or act of monitoring. An abductive approach is suitable because no single literature fully captures the conjunction of technical affordances, organisational norms, affective salience, anticipated evaluation and recursive behavioural reproduction that constitutes this problem. The objective is therefore theoretical synthesis with differentiation, not the assertion of an untouched empirical domain.

2.2 Selection and role of the literature domains

The literature base was assembled iteratively through theoretical sampling rather than a review protocol intended to exhaust all publications in a field. Sources were selected because they provided rival explanations, boundary conditions or conceptual building blocks for the focal phenomenon. Six domains play distinct roles. First, organisational-control scholarship establishes the benchmark mechanisms against which AGT must be differentiated, including market, bureaucratic and clan control (Ouchi, 1979), input, behaviour and output controls (Snell, 1992), labour-process control (Braverman, 1974; Edwards, 1979), normative and concertive control (Barker, 1993; Kunda, 1992), governmentality (Foucault, 1977, 1991) and field-level institutional pressures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Institutional theory is not treated as a micro-level control theory; it is included because coercive, normative and mimetic pressures help explain how organisational expectations become legitimate and normalised.

Second, affordance and sociomaterial scholarship explains how technical features enable or constrain action and how technology becomes consequential in practice (Leonardi, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007; Treem and Leonardi, 2012). Third, algorithmic and datafication-control research explains technologically mediated direction, evaluation, discipline and information asymmetry (Kellogg et al., 2020; Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Schafheitle et al., 2020; Wood et al., 2019). Fourth, digital-nudging and persuasive-technology research demonstrates how interface design can guide judgement and behaviour through choice architecture, feedback and gamified or persuasive features (Weinmann et al., 2016; Wenker, 2022). Fifth, surveillance and electronic performance-monitoring research identifies observation, visibility and monitoring characteristics as control-relevant conditions (Ball, 2021; Ravid et al., 2020, 2023). Sixth, affect, cognition, work design and well-being scholarship provides concepts for theorising affective orientation, behavioural readiness, psychological demands, recovery and sustainable work (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002; Melnikoff and Bargh, 2023; Parker and Grote, 2022; Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007; Zeshan et al., 2025).

Technostress is deliberately not treated as a theory of organisational control. Its relevance is downstream: it helps explain how digitally mediated demands can affect employee strain and well-being once a governance mechanism has been specified (Tarafdar et al., 2019). This separation avoids conflating explanations of control with explanations of its psychological consequences.

2.3 Abductive analytical procedure

Theory development proceeded through five analytic moves. The first was anomaly specification. The focal outcome was narrowed from ‘digital technologies influence behaviour’ to the more specific pattern in which recurrent digital cues acquire context-dependent evaluative force and sustain self-regulation across work episodes. This reformulation prevented novelty from resting on phenomena already explained by affordance, algorithmic-control, nudging or surveillance research.

The second move was comparison of alternative explanations. For each adjacent literature, the analysis identified its primary unit of analysis, mechanism and behavioural prediction. A candidate AGT construct was retained only if it could not be reduced without loss to perceived observation, an explicit algorithmic directive or incentive, a discrete nudge, a generic affordance, or normative internalisation. Table 1 reports this comparison directly rather than treating adjacent theories as deficient in general.

Table 1. Adjacent explanations of digital and organisational control and the residual contribution of AGT.

The third move was iterative construct formation. The concepts of affective configuration, affective inscription, anticipatory self-regulation and moral economy of digital presence were refined by repeatedly asking what each construct explains, what it excludes, and how it relates to established mechanisms. Particular attention was given to the transition from digital infrastructure to affective configuration because this is the theory's principal differentiating step.

The fourth move was boundary and discriminant testing. Counterfactual cases were used conceptually to identify when AGT should have weak explanatory power: infrequently used systems, low-visibility tools, environments with explicit outcome-based expectations and strong asynchronous norms, or settings where behaviour is primarily determined by direct algorithmic allocation and reward. This move generated both the boundary conditions and the theory's discriminant predictions.

The fifth move was relational specification. Constructs were arranged into a recursive causal model and converted into propositions that identify emergence, mechanism, reinforcement, outcomes and moderation. The resulting conceptual model is presented in Figure 1. The resulting theory was assessed against four criteria commonly associated with useful conceptual contribution: conceptual clarity, internal coherence, discriminant value and empirical contestability (Corley and Gioia, 2011; Jaakkola, 2020). The procedure is therefore transparent about how the argument was constructed while avoiding a misleading claim that the paper used a systematic review method.

3 Organisational control in digitally mediated work

3.1 Established organisational-control mechanisms

Organisational control concerns the mechanisms through which organisations align individual and collective conduct with desired objectives. Classical management scholarship demonstrates that control is plural rather than unitary. Ouchi (1979) distinguishes market, bureaucratic and clan mechanisms whose viability depends on informational and social conditions. Snell (1992) differentiates input, behaviour and output controls, showing that control configurations depend on the availability of standards and knowledge of cause-effect relations. Labour-process scholarship locates control in the organisation of production and managerial authority (Braverman, 1974; Edwards, 1979), while normative and concertive-control research shows that values, identity and peer systems can govern behaviour without continuous direct supervision (Barker, 1993; Kunda, 1992).

Governmentality provides a further account of self-regulation by explaining how governing rationalities become implicated in the conduct of the self (Foucault, 1977, 1991). Institutional scholarship, at a different level of analysis, shows how coercive, mimetic and normative pressures contribute to the legitimacy and diffusion of organisational practices (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). These traditions matter for AGT because they establish that control can be structural, normative and self-administered. AGT does not replace them. Its task is to specify a digital-affective configuration through which established organisational expectations can become rapidly and repeatedly behaviourally consequential.

3.2 Affordances and sociomateriality

Affordance research provides a direct corrective to accounts that treat digital technologies as neutral containers. Treem and Leonardi (2012) identify visibility, persistence, editability and association as affordances of organisational social media that enable forms of communication and knowledge sharing that were difficult to achieve through earlier media. Leonardi (2011) similarly conceptualises affordances and constraints relationally: material features become consequential through their relation to actors' goals and practices. Sociomaterial perspectives go further by resisting a strict separation between the social and material in organisational practice (Orlikowski, 2007).

Digital infrastructures are therefore not neutral starting points. Interface and system design can privilege particular forms of action, visibility and response through features such as default notifications, presence indicators, read receipts, activity logs, ratings and visual alerts. Such features may embody assumptions about desirable behaviour and make some actions easier, more visible or more consequential than others. AGT does not treat these design properties as socially inert. Rather, it distinguishes the behavioural possibilities and evaluative cues embedded in technological design from the organisational processes through which those cues acquire relatively stable affective and evaluative significance. Platform design may therefore preconfigure the conditions for affective governance, while organisational norms, leadership practices and anticipated consequences shape whether and how that potential becomes established in everyday work.

These perspectives already explain why a presence indicator, persistent message history or activity feed can alter what employees and managers can know and do. AGT therefore does not claim novelty for the proposition that platform features enable visibility or shape practice. Its remaining theoretical question is evaluative and affective: under what organisational conditions do recurrent digital cues become linked to norms and anticipated consequences strongly enough to acquire relatively stable affective and evaluative significance? An affordance specifies a possibility for action; an affective configuration specifies a governance-relevant organisational condition in which digital possibilities, norms and anticipated consequences become sufficiently integrated to shape behavioural self-regulation.

3.3 Algorithmic, platform and datafication-based control

Algorithmic-management research offers one of the strongest existing accounts of digitally mediated control (Keegan and Meijerink, 2025; Kellogg et al., 2020). Kellogg et al. (2020) synthesise algorithmic control through six mechanisms: restricting and recommending to direct workers, recording and rating to evaluate them, and replacing and rewarding to discipline them. Platform-work research demonstrates that control can also operate indirectly through information and power asymmetries that structure worker choices (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016), while gig-work studies show how algorithmic systems can combine autonomy with intensive control (Wood et al., 2019). Datafication research broadens the focus beyond platform work by showing how employee-related data technologies can reconfigure traditional control dimensions in conventional organisations (Schafheitle et al., 2020).

Algorithmic management also changes the location and form of managerial authority. Functions previously exercised predominantly through direct managerial judgement, such as allocating work, evaluating performance, prioritising tasks or determining rewards, can increasingly be translated into digitally encoded rules, recommendations, ratings and automated evaluations. Managerial control is therefore not removed but redistributed through technological systems that mediate how organisational expectations are communicated and enforced. This shift can make the source of authority less immediately interpersonal while increasing the importance of data, metrics and system-generated evaluations in directing employee behaviour.

This literature makes it untenable to frame digital systems as an unexplored route to behavioural regulation. AGT instead asks what happens when the cues generated by these and less algorithmic systems acquire organisational meaning that persists beyond a discrete algorithmic intervention. Algorithmic control is most clearly present when a computational system directs, records, evaluates or disciplines conduct. Affective governance can coexist with algorithmic control, but it is conceptually distinct because its immediate mechanism is the affective-evaluative force of an organisational environment rather than the algorithmic operation itself. A rating may therefore function simultaneously as algorithmic evaluation and as an affectively inscribed signal whose anticipated meaning shapes behaviour before the next formal evaluation occurs.

3.4 Digital nudging, persuasive technology and gamified influence

Digital-nudging research explicitly demonstrates that interface design can guide judgement and decision-making in digital choice environments (Weinmann et al., 2016). Persuasive-technology research extends this logic to workplace systems and shows that employee behaviour can be influenced without direct supervision, including through interactivity, rapid feedback and gamification (Wenker, 2022). These literatures are especially important because they address behaviourally consequential design rather than treating technological influence as merely informational.

AGT is not a relabelling of digital nudging or persuasive technology. The distinction concerns both the unit of analysis and the source of influence. A nudge is typically a design element within a choice architecture intended to steer a discrete judgement or behaviour without removing alternatives. Persuasive technology similarly focuses on systems designed to influence attitudes or behaviour. Affective configuration, by contrast, is an emergent organisational condition that develops through recurrent interaction between designed platform features, local norms, leadership practices and anticipated evaluation. Its influence extends across repeated organisational interactions rather than necessarily operating at a single choice point. This distinction makes it possible to examine how an ‘available’ status that primarily serves a coordination function can acquire additional evaluative and affective significance through organisational use, even when it was not deliberately designed as a behavioural intervention.

This distinction does not imply that technological design is neutral before organisational use occurs. Digital systems may already incorporate control-relevant design features, defaults and evaluative cues that privilege particular forms of visibility, responsiveness or participation. AGT focuses on whether these design properties become linked to organisational norms and anticipated consequences strongly enough to acquire relatively stable affective and evaluative significance.

3.5 Surveillance and electronic performance monitoring

Surveillance and electronic performance monitoring (EPM) provide a further adjacent explanation. EPM systems increase the capacity to observe, record and evaluate employee activity, and their consequences depend on characteristics such as transparency, invasiveness and implementation (Ball, 2021; Ravid et al., 2020, 2023). Behaviour can change because employees know or suspect that they are being observed. Visibility is therefore a well-established mechanism of control, not a gap that AGT seeks to claim.

Soft surveillance can be understood as a less explicit form of observation in which employees regulate their behaviour because they recognise that digital activity may be visible, recorded or subsequently evaluated. Its immediate mechanism nevertheless remains actual or anticipated observation. AGT treats this as analytically distinct from affective governance because self-regulation may persist even when active observation is absent or uncertain. Soft surveillance may contribute to affective governance when surveillance-related cues become linked to organisational norms and anticipated consequences, but it does not by itself explain the broader affective and evaluative configuration through which those cues continue to shape behaviour.

AGT becomes theoretically useful where affective-evaluative pressure is not reducible to contemporaneous perceived observation. An employee may respond rapidly to a message because the notification has become associated with relational exposure or professional legitimacy even when no manager is known to be monitoring response time. Perceived surveillance can strengthen affective governance, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the broader configuration. This gives AGT a discriminant prediction: once affective configuration has become established, its association with self-regulation should remain after accounting for perceived monitoring and explicit monitoring intensity.

3.6 The theoretical opportunity: from digital affordances to affective configuration

The literature therefore contains substantial explanations of digital behavioural governance. The opportunity for theory development lies in their conjunction rather than their absence. Affordance theory explains action possibilities, algorithmic-control research explains technologically mediated direction and evaluation, digital nudging explains interface-based steering, surveillance explains observation, and normative-control traditions explain internalised organisational expectations. What remains less explicitly theorised is the organisational conversion process through which recurrent digital cues become collectively meaningful, affectively salient and self-reinforcing across everyday work.

AGT treats this as a configurational problem. The same feature should produce stronger affective governance when it is recurrent, socially or evaluatively legible, linked to a local norm, and associated with anticipated relational or professional consequences. Under weak versions of these conditions, the feature remains principally technical. Under strong co-occurrence, it becomes part of an affective configuration. Table 1 locates this claim against the adjacent literatures and makes clear both what AGT accepts from them and what it adds.

4 Introducing affective governance theory

4.1 The status and scope of AGT

Affective Governance Theory is a new mid-range theory formulated in this paper. The term AGT is not used here to denote an established theory in the literature. Its purpose is deliberately bounded: to explain a form of organisational control that emerges where work is recurrently mediated through digital infrastructure and where digital cues are linked to organisational norms and consequential evaluation. AGT is complementary to, rather than substitutive for, established control theories.

The theory adopts affect as an organisationally patterned orientation rather than a synonym for emotion. Following affect scholarship, affect is used to denote embodied intensities and orientations that shape readiness to act before, or alongside, explicit reflective labelling (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002). The term pre-reflective therefore does not mean unconscious, automatic or cognitively empty. AGT makes the narrower claim that action can be rapidly oriented by affectively significant cues before deliberate appraisal of an organisational rule is complete. Reflective cognition can subsequently confirm, reinterpret or resist the initial orientation. This formulation is consistent with contemporary criticism of rigid dual-process dichotomies and avoids treating cognition and affect as separate systems (Melnikoff and Bargh, 2023).

Affective governance is defined as the organisational process through which recurrent digital cues linked to organisational norms acquire affective and evaluative force that orients behavioural self-regulation. Organisational control is the broader outcome to which this process may contribute. The distinction matters because AGT is a mechanism theory, not a claim that affective governance is the sole or dominant form of control in digitally mediated organisations.

4.2 Core constructs and discriminant definitions

Table 2 summarises the core constructs of AGT and distinguishes each construct from adjacent concepts.

Table 2. Core constructs of affective governance theory.

4.3 When a sociotechnical environment becomes an affective configuration

A sociotechnical environment becomes an affective configuration only when technical possibility is converted into relatively stable organisational significance. AGT identifies four conversion conditions. The first is recurrent dependence: employees encounter the system often enough, and for organisationally consequential tasks, that cues can accumulate meaning across episodes. The second is evaluative legibility: digital behaviour is visible, inferable or otherwise capable of being interpreted by consequential others or systems. The third is norm linkage: local leadership, peer practices, professional expectations or HR systems associate particular digital behaviours with desirable conduct. The fourth is anticipated consequence: employees expect that conformity or non-conformity may carry relational, reputational, developmental or employment consequences, even when those consequences are informal or uncertain.

No single condition is sufficient. A persistent messaging feature can be recurrent but not evaluatively consequential; a monitored dashboard can be visible but weakly linked to professionalism; a formal responsiveness norm may exist without digital mediation. Affective configuration strengthens as these conditions co-occur and repeatedly reinforce one another. This configuration explains why an identical technological feature can have different behavioural effects across organisations. In one setting, a green presence indicator may be a coordination convenience. In another, repeated managerial attention to status, peer comparisons and implicit assumptions that visibility signals commitment can turn the same feature into a governance-relevant cue.

This distinction also clarifies the relationship between AGT and digital nudging. A nudge can be present without affective configuration if a discrete design element steers a choice but does not acquire stable organisational meaning. Conversely, affective configuration can emerge without a deliberately designed nudge when ordinary platform features become morally and evaluatively charged through repeated organisational use. The object of AGT is thus the organisationally emergent environment, not the technical feature in isolation.

4.4 Foundational assumptions

AGT rests on four assumptions. First, digital work infrastructures are relational organisational environments: their consequences depend on the interaction between features, users, norms and institutional arrangements rather than on technology alone (Leonardi, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007). Second, organisational control can be affectively mediated. Behavioural orientation may begin through rapid affectively significant appraisal even when employees later engage in deliberate interpretation and resistance. Third, affective governance is emergent and contextual. Leadership practices, performance systems, professional norms and power relations determine whether technically similar environments develop strong or weak affective configuration. Fourth, employee agency is preserved. AGT predicts patterned pressure and self-regulation, not behavioural inevitability. Employees can contest, reinterpret, ignore or redesign the cues through which governance operates.

5 How affective governance operates

5.1 Affective inscription

Affective inscription is the process through which recurrent digital cues acquire durable affective and evaluative valence. The mechanism begins with repetition under organisationally meaningful conditions. A response timestamp, unread-message badge, activity metric or availability indicator is initially capable of serving a technical function. When the cue is repeatedly encountered alongside managerial reactions, peer responses, performance talk or professional norms, it becomes associated with meanings such as reliability, commitment, exposure or risk. The cue can then orient action more quickly than a fresh interpretation of a formal rule would require.

This mechanism builds on affordance and sociomaterial scholarship but is not equivalent to affordance enactment. Affordances concern possibilities for action in relation to actors and material features (Leonardi, 2011; Treem and Leonardi, 2012). Affective inscription concerns the acquisition of evaluative valence through repeated organisational linkage. The empirical implication is that technical features should become stronger predictors of affective response and self-regulation when employees report repeated links between those features and consequential organisational meanings.

5.2 Anticipatory self-regulation

Anticipatory self-regulation translates affectively inscribed cues into conduct. Employees regulate responsiveness, visibility, availability or participation because they anticipate how delay, absence or non-participation could be interpreted. The anticipated consequence need not be a formal sanction. It may concern being seen as uncommitted, missing an opportunity, burdening colleagues, appearing unresponsive to a senior person, or losing access to valued work. Such anticipation can prompt a rapid response before an employee has deliberately assessed whether a formal obligation exists.

This mechanism overlaps with but is not reducible to surveillance. Active monitoring can heighten anticipated evaluation, and algorithmic rating can make consequences explicit. AGT predicts that anticipatory self-regulation can also be sustained when observation is intermittent or ambiguous because the environment has already acquired affective significance. Nor does the mechanism imply irrationality. Rapid response may be strategically sensible in a context where relational and professional consequences are real. The theoretical claim concerns the temporal and affective organisation of the response, not its rationality.

5.3 The moral economy of digital presence

Individual anticipation becomes organisationally durable when digital conduct is collectively valued. Drawing on the concept of moral economy, AGT uses the moral economy of digital presence to describe shared judgements about what a ‘good’, reliable or committed worker should look like in digitally mediated work (Sayer, 2005; Thompson, 1971). Prompt responses can become signs of collegiality, online visibility can become a proxy for effort, and after-hours availability can be interpreted as dedication even when none is formally required.

The mechanism is moral rather than merely statistical because digital behaviours become linked to judgements of worth and legitimacy. It is also organisational rather than purely individual because those judgements circulate through teams, leadership discourse, performance systems and everyday interaction. Once established, the moral economy reinforces affective inscription: a cue carries stronger affective force precisely because employees know how the relevant behaviour is socially evaluated.

5.4 Recursive reproduction, context and structural amplification

The three mechanisms are mutually reinforcing rather than sequential stages. Affective inscription develops as repeated digital cues acquire organisational meaning. Anticipatory self-regulation then shapes how employees adjust their behaviour in response to those meanings. Over time, the moral economy of digital presence reinforces these behaviours by treating responsiveness, visibility and participation as indicators of appropriate organisational conduct. The resulting norms then feed back into subsequent encounters with the digital infrastructure. Affective configuration may be partly enabled by technological design, but it is reproduced and stabilised through organisational practice rather than determined by design alone.

Organisational context determines the strength of this loop. Outcome-based performance management, explicit asynchronous norms, protected non-work time and leaders who model delayed responses can weaken the linkage between digital presence and professional worth. By contrast, ambiguous performance criteria, high visibility, rapid-response expectations and leadership attention to online status can intensify it. Structural position further shapes the stakes. Employees with insecure contracts, low status or limited bargaining power may reasonably anticipate greater costs from non-responsiveness than colleagues with greater discretion. Gendered and intersectional expectations may also alter who is expected to be relationally available and who can safely disengage (Crenshaw, 1989). Structural amplification is thus a moderator of the theory rather than a separate mechanism.

6 Theoretical propositions

The propositions below convert AGT into a testable research programme. They are formulated to avoid a circular claim that digital environments matter whenever employees say they matter. Each proposition specifies a relationship that can be evaluated against established alternative explanations.

6.1 Proposition 1: emergence of affective configuration

Affective configuration will be strongest when recurrent dependence on a digital work infrastructure, evaluative legibility, organisational norm linkage and anticipated relational or professional consequences jointly co-occur; this configuration should generate stronger affective-evaluative salience than any condition in isolation.

This proposition makes AGT a configurational rather than merely additive claim. Frequency of use alone is insufficient, as is visibility without normative or consequential meaning. AGT predicts stronger affective configuration where the four conditions reinforce one another and weaker configuration where digital behaviour is low-stakes, private or clearly separated from evaluation. The theory would be weakened if the conditions operated only as independent correlates and their joint configuration added no explanatory value.

6.2 Proposition 2: affective inscription

Repeated association between digital cues and consequential organisational meanings will increase the stable affective and evaluative salience of those cues, beyond the effect of the technical affordance alone.

A test could compare identical features across teams with different local norms or examine changes after leaders alter the meaning attached to response times, visibility or activity indicators.

6.3 Proposition 3: anticipatory self-regulation

Stronger affective configuration will be associated with greater anticipatory self-regulation in responsiveness, visibility, availability or participation after controlling for perceived monitoring, formal response requirements, explicit algorithmic incentives and exposure to discrete digital nudges.

This is the core discriminant proposition. Evidence that the association disappears once established control mechanisms are modelled would weaken the claim that affective governance adds explanatory value.

6.4 Proposition 4: moral reinforcement

Shared moral valuation of digital presence will strengthen and stabilise the relationship between affective configuration and anticipatory self-regulation by making digital conduct a signal of professional legitimacy and belonging.

The proposition can be tested at team level by examining whether shared norms about responsiveness or visibility amplify individual-level self-regulation over and above formal policy.

6.5 Proposition 5: recursive organisational reproduction

Aggregated patterns of digitally mediated self-regulation will reinforce organisational norms and platform-use practices that subsequently strengthen the affective configuration, creating a recursive feedback loop.

Longitudinal designs are particularly important because the proposition concerns mutual reinforcement over time rather than a one-directional technology effect.

6.6 Proposition 6: sustainable-work consequences

When affective governance increases sustained self-monitoring, responsiveness and boundary permeability without compensating resources, it will be associated with greater work intensification, poorer psychological detachment and lower well-being; these effects will be reduced where employees have autonomy, recovery opportunities and explicit boundary-supportive resources.

The proposition integrates AGT with Job Demands-Resources reasoning and recovery research rather than treating affective governance as inherently harmful (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017; Sonnentag and Fritz, 2007). The same configuration can facilitate coordination when demands are bounded and resourced, but undermine sustainable work when coordination depends on chronic availability.

6.7 Proposition 7: structural amplification

The relationship between affective configuration and anticipatory self-regulation will be stronger where employment insecurity, lower organisational status, asymmetric leadership dependence or historically patterned inequalities increase the anticipated cost of digital non-conformity.

This proposition rejects a universal employee response. It predicts systematic heterogeneity grounded in organisational power rather than individual sensitivity alone.

7 Boundary conditions and discriminant predictions

7.1 Technological and organisational boundaries

AGT should have greatest explanatory value in contexts where digital work infrastructures are recurrent, persistent and organisationally consequential. Remote and hybrid knowledge work, digitally enabled professional services, project-based collaboration and data-intensive work are likely candidates because communication, coordination and evaluation routinely leave digital traces. The theory should be weaker where technology performs occasional administrative functions or where conduct is governed primarily through immediate face-to-face supervision, highly prescribed manual routines or one-off digital interactions. Platform type matters through function rather than brand. Messaging and email systems may generate affective governance through response latency, read status and after-hours persistence. Workflow tools may do so through dashboards, task ageing or transparent completion metrics. Video-conferencing systems may generate it through attendance, camera norms and visible participation. Algorithmic systems may add ratings, recommendations or rewards. An intranet with infrequent, non-evaluative use may generate little affective configuration. The theory therefore predicts variation across system affordances and local organisational use rather than assuming all ‘digital technologies’ operate similarly.

7.2 Discriminant predictions against adjacent mechanisms

AGT can be distinguished empirically from neighbouring explanations. Against surveillance, affective configuration should explain additional variance in self-regulation after perceived observation and EPM intensity are controlled. Against algorithmic control, AGT should retain explanatory value in settings where no algorithm directly allocates, rates or rewards the focal behaviour. Against digital nudging, the effect should extend across repeated organisational episodes rather than depend on a discrete choice-architecture manipulation. Against generic affordance enactment, the critical moderator should be norm linkage and anticipated consequence, not feature availability alone. Against normative control, the digital cue environment should provide incremental explanatory value for when and how a norm is activated in everyday work. These comparisons impose a demanding standard on the theory. If empirical studies show that affective configuration is indistinguishable from perceived monitoring, normative pressure or persuasive design, AGT should be revised or narrowed. This falsifiability is preferable to defining the theory so broadly that any digital influence counts as affective governance. Accordingly, AGT should be evaluated against rival explanatory models rather than only through zero-order associations. Support requires evidence that the proposed configuration and its mechanisms improve explanation beyond models containing perceived surveillance, algorithmic control, affordance enactment, discrete nudging and normative pressure alone. If such comparisons show no incremental or discriminant value, AGT should be treated as a relabelling of established mechanisms rather than as a distinct theory.

7.3 Agency, power and temporal boundaries

AGT is not technologically deterministic. Employees can ignore notifications, disable visibility, collectively renegotiate norms, use delay strategically or challenge performance practices that equate presence with productivity. Such resistance may weaken affective inscription or alter the moral economy. Nor should all rapid response be interpreted as governance: employees may respond because a task is intrinsically meaningful, genuinely urgent or voluntarily collaborative. Empirical applications must therefore distinguish organisationally patterned anticipatory pressure from preference and task necessity. The theory also contains a temporal boundary. Affective configuration requires repeated interaction and some stability of organisational meaning. Newly introduced systems may initially produce novelty, confusion or explicit compliance rather than affective governance. Conversely, configuration can weaken over time when leadership changes, settings are redesigned, employees collectively resist, or evaluation is visibly separated from presence. This makes emergence and dissolution equally important empirical questions.

8 Discussion and implications of affective governance theory

8.1 Implications for organisational theory

AGT contributes to organisational-control scholarship by adding a meso-level configurational mechanism rather than another list of digital features. It links material affordances to organisational evaluation by specifying how recurrent digital cues acquire affective force through local norms and anticipated consequences. The theory therefore complements classical control configurations, governmentality, algorithmic control and surveillance while preserving their distinct mechanisms. A second contribution concerns recursion. Affective governance is neither simply imposed from above nor solely internalised by individuals. Employees' own responsive practices help constitute the norms that later govern them and others. This recursive model creates a bridge between individual self-regulation and organisational reproduction without assuming that either technology or culture independently causes the outcome.

8.2 Implications for industrial and organisational psychology

For Industrial and Organisational Psychology, AGT shifts assessment from individual digital coping alone towards the design of the work system. Technostress, overload and impaired detachment remain important outcomes, but they should not be treated as if they arise only from personal technology use. Where digital infrastructure systematically converts visibility and responsiveness into affectively charged demands, the relevant intervention target includes platform configuration, leadership behaviour, performance systems and team norms (Tarafdar et al., 2019). The theory also opens a measurement agenda. Affective configuration should be operationalised as a higher-order organisational construct capturing recurrent digital dependence, evaluative legibility, norm linkage and anticipated consequence, while its mechanisms should be measured separately. Discriminant validity must be demonstrated against perceived surveillance, algorithmic management, availability expectations, technostress and normative pressure. This is essential if AGT is to become an empirically useful theory rather than a new vocabulary for known constructs.

8.3 Sustainable work and sustainable digital transformation

AGT extends debates on sustainable digital transformation by making a simple but consequential distinction: a digitally efficient work system is not necessarily a sustainable work system. Sustainable workplaces require the preservation of employee resources, well-being and capacity to remain healthy and effective over time, not productivity gains alone (Zeshan et al., 2025). Digital transformation becomes organisationally unsustainable when coordination efficiencies are achieved by transferring hidden costs to employees in the form of chronic availability, continuous self-monitoring, impaired recovery or pressure to demonstrate presence.

This argument is consistent with Job Demands-Resources theory. Digital visibility and rapid coordination can function as resources when they improve clarity, support collaboration or reduce friction. The same infrastructure becomes demanding when evaluative ambiguity and presence norms require employees to remain continuously alert to cues and to regulate their behaviour to avoid reputational or relational costs (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017). Sustainable digital transformation therefore requires organisations to evaluate the demand-resource balance created by digital governance, not merely the functionality of the technology. AGT adds a governance criterion to this sustainability agenda. Responsible transformation should ask whether the configuration preserves meaningful autonomy, recovery, dignity and equitable participation across employee groups. This reframes well-being from a downstream benefit to a design constraint. A system should not be judged sustainable if its productivity rests on unbounded psychological standby, even when no policy explicitly requires after-hours availability.

8.4 Actionable organisational diagnostic

Table 3 converts AGT into diagnostic questions for technology selection, implementation and redesign. The questions are intended for joint use by HR, Industrial and Organisational Psychology, line leadership, employee representatives and technology-design teams.

Table 3. AGT digital governance diagnostic for sustainable digital work design.

This diagnostic extends algorithmic-control insights by asking not only what a system restricts, recommends, records, rates, replaces or rewards (Kellogg et al., 2020), but also what organisational meanings accumulate around its everyday cues. The practical target is not to remove visibility or digital coordination. It is to prevent technically convenient features from becoming unexamined proxies for commitment and to ensure that governance remains proportionate, transparent and compatible with sustainable work.

8.5 Ethical and equity implications

Affective governance raises ethical questions because influence can be consequential even when it is diffuse, informal or unintended. Transparency is therefore not exhausted by disclosing whether an algorithm is used. Organisations should also make explicit the norms attached to digital presence, the purposes for which trace data are interpreted, and the limits of managerial inference. Employees should be able to distinguish a coordination signal from a performance signal. Equity is equally important. Structural amplification predicts that identical digital expectations may impose different costs on employees with lower status, insecure employment, caring responsibilities or limited bargaining power. A responsible digital governance approach should therefore assess differential exposure rather than assume equal impact from formally identical platform settings. The ethical standard is not merely whether a technology can be used, but whether the organisational configuration it creates preserves autonomy, dignity, contestability and equitable participation.

9 Future research agenda

9.1 Construct development and discriminant validity

The first priority is rigorous construct development. Qualitative work should establish how employees describe recurrent digital cues, norm linkage and anticipated consequences across occupations. Subsequent scale development should test whether affective configuration is empirically distinguishable from perceived monitoring, electronic performance monitoring, algorithmic-management exposure, normative pressure, availability expectations and technostress. Confirmatory work should assess whether a higher-order construct improves explanation beyond its component conditions or whether AGT is better represented as a configurational model. Incremental validity is especially important. Proposition 3 requires evidence that affective configuration predicts self-regulation after established control mechanisms are modelled. Researchers should compare rival additive, interaction/configurational and mechanism models rather than testing AGT only in isolation. Without improved explanatory or discriminant value, the construct should not be retained merely because it is intuitively appealing.

9.2 Experimental and quasi-experimental tests

Experiments can isolate the conversion conditions by holding a technical feature constant while varying organisational meaning. For example, a presence indicator could be presented under outcome-based versus presence-based performance norms, or a response timestamp could be paired with high versus low anticipated evaluative consequence. Such designs would test whether norm linkage and consequence anticipation alter affective response and behavioural latency beyond the feature itself. Field experiments and configuration changes offer stronger ecological validity. Organisations that disable read receipts, change notification defaults, adopt asynchronous norms or separate online status from performance evaluation provide opportunities to test whether predicted reductions in anticipatory self-regulation and psychological standby follow.

9.3 Longitudinal and multilevel research

Because affective configuration is theorised as emergent and recursive, cross-sectional evidence will be insufficient for key claims. Longitudinal studies should examine how new platforms acquire meaning over time, whether collective behaviour precedes moralisation of digital presence, and whether changes in leadership or work design weaken established cue-meaning associations. Experience-sampling designs could capture rapid cue exposure, affective orientation and behavioural response within persons, while team-level measures could assess shared moral economies. Multilevel models are also required as AGT links system characteristics, team norms, individual anticipation and structural position. The theory predicts that the same individual may respond differently across teams or systems and that team-level norm linkage will moderate individual responses.

9.4 Comparative research and structural amplification

Comparative studies should test the theory across platform types, occupations and national settings. Norms concerning hierarchy, responsiveness, working time and professional commitment vary across institutional contexts. These differences should affect both the emergence of affective configuration and the moral interpretation of digital presence. Research should therefore avoid assuming that a ‘Teams effect’ or ‘email effect’ is universal. Structural amplification also warrants direct testing. Researchers could examine whether contract insecurity, organisational status, managerial dependence, gendered expectations or intersectional position alter the consequences anticipated from digital non-conformity. Such studies would clarify whether unequal digital pressure is produced by technology itself or by pre-existing relations of power that become legible through the technology.

9.5 Sustainable digital transformation interventions

Finally, intervention research should evaluate whether AGT-informed redesign improves both organisational coordination and sustainable work. Outcomes should include response quality, coordination effectiveness, error rates and service continuity alongside autonomy, detachment, workload, well-being and turnover intentions. The strongest test of the theory's practical utility is whether targeted changes to the configuration, rather than individual coping training alone, alter the predicted governance mechanism. This agenda positions AGT as a theory to be tested and potentially revised, not as a completed explanation. Its scientific value will depend on whether the proposed constructs and relationships survive direct comparison with the well-established literatures that motivated their refinement.

10 Conclusion

Digital work research already demonstrates that platforms afford new forms of visibility, algorithms direct and evaluate conduct, interfaces can nudge behaviour, and monitoring shapes self-regulation. Affective Governance Theory does not seek novelty by denying those contributions. It advances a narrower claim: recurrent digital cues can become an organisational configuration of control when they are repeatedly linked to local norms and anticipated consequences strongly enough to acquire stable affective-evaluative force. AGT specifies when this conversion is expected to occur and how it is reproduced through affective inscription, anticipatory self-regulation and the moral economy of digital presence. It also identifies where the theory should fail: low-dependence, low-visibility and low-stakes digital environments, or contexts in which established mechanisms fully account for behaviour. These boundaries make the theory more, rather than less, useful because they permit direct empirical comparison with surveillance, algorithmic control, nudging, affordance and normative-control explanations. The practical implication is equally specific. Digital transformation should be evaluated as an organisational-governance intervention, not only a technology project. Where performance becomes inferred from presence, where response latency becomes moralised, or where opaque digital traces generate chronic anticipatory pressure, efficiency may be purchased at the expense of sustainable work. Designing responsible digital organisations therefore requires attention to what systems enable, what organisational meanings are attached to those capabilities, and what employees must continually do to remain legible as committed workers.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Fulvio Signore, Mercatorum University, Italy

Reviewed by: Mariarosaria Morelli, University of Bergamo, Italy

Jasmin Schreyer, University of Erlangen Nuremberg, Germany