Digital surveillance has become embedded in routine work through electronic performance monitoring, behavioral analytics, algorithmic evaluation, location tracking, communication analysis, and data-driven human-resource systems. Yet organizational scholarship often treats surveillance primarily as a technology, a control practice, or a privacy problem, leaving underdeveloped the question of when employees interpret monitoring as a failure of reciprocal organizational obligations. This Original Conceptual Framework Article proposes the Surveillance–Contract Interpretation and Repair Framework, an original non-empirical synthesis that positions surveillance as a potentially contract-relevant event rather than an automatic breach. The framework distinguishes surveillance architecture from enacted monitoring, formal permission from perceived legitimacy, privacy concern from attributed obligation failure, perceived breach from violation affect, and employee visibility from valid performance knowledge. It proposes that monitoring purpose, proportionality, contextual integrity, procedural fairness, trust, voice, and recourse may shape whether surveillance is interpreted as compatible with, ambiguous within, or contrary to the psychological contract. It further differentiates compliance, adaptation, gaming, voice, resistance, and withdrawal, and identifies acknowledgment, reparation, renegotiation, work redesign, and governance change as possible repair pathways. The framework generates testable propositions and specifies temporal, multilevel, measurement, and comparative research priorities. Its relationships remain conceptually plausible rather than causally validated. Applicability is conditional on employment arrangements, institutional protections, work design, prior trust, surveillance type, and organizational context. The contribution is an integrated vocabulary and research architecture for examining how digital surveillance becomes an employment-relationship event with consequences that cannot be inferred from technical capability alone.
