Tel Aviv Organizations big and small are increasingly using polygraph tests to uncover the sources of leaks to competitors or to the press. A decision by the incoming Cellcom CEO, Yitzhak Peterburg, to send all senior management personnel for polygraph, or lie detector, tests to reveal who leaked information from closed meetings is nothing out of the ordinary.
Most organizational experts say that such a step is an attempt to subordinate the ranks, a signal that says: "Here comes the new CEO to straighten out the organization, in which everyone has been doing as he pleases."
Workers' committees, on the other hand, view it as a sign of weakness and say that sending employees for polygraph tests does not indicate the CEO's leadership capability, but rather his insecurity.
The polygraph is often used as the last step in building a case against a worker whose phone calls and faxes have been monitored, sometimes by hidden cameras.
The work office was not the first place in which the polygraph was used. When it was introduced during World War II, the U.S. Army used it to verify the loyalty of officers suspected of passing information to the enemy. Over the years, many other organizations - both governmental and in the business world - began to use the polygraph to test the loyalty of their employees.
Ishayahu Horowitz, a former policeman and now the owner of the I. Horowitz Gazit Ozery Institute for Polygraph and Forensic Science, says that some 25,000 to 30,000 polygraph tests are conducted in Israel annually for employer-employee relations purposes by both government and private organizations.
Horowitz said that the United States, Israel, Japan and Canada used the polygraph more extensively than other countries, but that Europe was catching up.
The expansion of the European Union has led to an increase in multinational companies and with it an increase in mutual suspiciousness regarding employer-employee loyalty, he explained.
"Polygraph tests are not only for discovering which worker is responsible for the disappearance of equipment, or which computer programmer gave inside information to someone outside the company," Horowitz continued. "Managers send workers for polygraph tests not only to discover disloyal workers or thieves, but also to deter workers from doing anything that might harm the company."
Horowitz believes that the main reason for increased polygraph use in recent years is the decline in work norms. People felt more secure in their jobs 20 years ago, thanks to collective work agreements, and didn't switch jobs every few years as they do today. Years ago, people identified more with their places of employment and with their goals, so managers were less suspicious of workers. No one, except perhaps for the managers of security companies, sent their employees for polygraph tests.
These days, employees feel less loyalty toward their workplaces because they have lost their faith in long-term job security. Companies are transferred to new owners more often than in the past, many companies have far more temporary workers than they did in the 1980s and many people work for two or three companies at the same time - something that can create a conflict of interests.
"These developments have caused a feeling of alienation between employees and their employers, combined with a lack of commitment from the workers and increased suspicions by the employers, leading to more orders for polygraph tests," Horowitz says.
He explains that the tests have an accuracy rate of 90 to 95 percent, but are not admissible as evidence in court unless both sides to a dispute agree. Some 75 percent of polygraph subjects are found to be truthful.
Nahum Feinberg, an attorney and expert in labor laws who usually represents employers, feels that they are justified in conducting periodic polygraph tests on certain employees, such as those who handle large sums in checks or cash, even when there are no suspicions against them.
"There are cases in which companies that trade with Third World countries ask a sales person who has visited those countries to collect payments to undergo polygraph tests in order to ensure that he has not made any secret deals," Feinberg says. 18 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030224/daf9d9f8/attachment.htm>