In these organizations the majority of the workers are guided by professional values and norms established by the profession. Doctors, accountants, and nurses, for example, are all required to pass professional board exams and are under the scrutiny of their professional codes of ethics. This helps to insure conformity with the professional standards. By default, organizations that employ professionals may need fewer bureaucratic control mechanisms because the professional standards perform the same control function. A final issue to consider in the topic of control is the ethical debate between the need for control and the need to maintain privacy for the individual workers.
Many organizations now require drug testing of new hires or random drug testing of all employees.
In order to prevent theft, an organization may also resort to surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, these techniques create difficult ethical issues. Certainly, we cannot resolve these issues here, but it is important for us to be aware that control of individuals behavior is not a simple process. Your text goes on to discuss in more detail the function of control in Chapter 21, Managing for Total Quality in Organizations, and Chapter 22, Managing Information and Information Technology. Both of these chapters serve as specific examples of how we manage the function of control.