Digitally managed organizational control systems increasingly shape how work is observed, evaluated, allocated, rewarded, and corrected. Yet the organizational problem is not simply that digital technologies intensify control; it is that they redistribute visibility, discretion, and interpretive authority in ways that may provoke heterogeneous employee responses. This Critical Review Article examines how measurement and surveillance practices become behavioral discipline, how workers interpret those arrangements, and how resistance develops at individual and collective levels. The review uses a transparent critical-review approach with PRISMA-compatible reporting to evaluate conceptual assumptions, evidence designs, measurement choices, mechanisms, contradictions, contextual boundaries, and unresolved questions across organizational behavior, human resource management, organization studies, and technology-mediated work. The evidence indicates that digital control is multidimensional: behavioral visibility, electronic monitoring, algorithmic scheduling, performance rating, reward allocation, and informal attitudinal monitoring are related but analytically distinct. Existing studies also challenge deterministic accounts because algorithmic control can coexist with autonomy, opaque evaluation can trigger reactivity, and power asymmetries do not eliminate worker agency. The article therefore treats resistance neither as simple noncompliance nor as inherently emancipatory. Its original contribution is a control–resistance synthesis in which control architecture is translated through behavioral discipline and worker interpretation before producing varied resistance repertoires and relational or performance consequences. The framework remains provisional. Evidence is uneven across occupations, technologies, countries, levels of analysis, and time horizons, and the proposed cross-domain relationships require longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, and intervention-sensitive testing.
