Abstract

Organizations gather and use data about employees; information about who they are (e.g., their birthday) and what they do (e.g., ideas contributed to a product team). Employees and employers may both perceive ownership of data provided or created by employees. A human resources associate, for example, may reveal an employee’s birth month to have a monthly birthday celebration at the workplace, and the employee whose information was revealed may feel a sense of unfairness when information they feel they have an ownership stake in is used in a way they deem inappropriate. Perceived privacy invasion can lead to a sense of injustice, and injustice has a negative effect on workplace outcomes such as productivity. It is in the organization’s best interest to minimize perceptions of unfairness arising from contradictory opinions on how data is disclosed by the organization both internally and externally. The theory of multilevel information privacy (TMIP) suggests that information ownership perceptions are an environmental characteristic that can help guide privacy decisions (Belanger & James, 2020). TMIP posits that if a person believes their organization owns the information that is being disclosed, this may be a factor that activates the person’s organizational identity, and consequently, that person will decide to disclose the information following the organization’s privacy preferences rather than their personal privacy preferences. Our interest in this study is in how ownership perceptions of data that has been disclosed by organizations influences employees’ perceptions of justice surrounding the disclosures. We conducted interviews with business professionals to uncover instances in which the ownership perceptions of data disclosed at work differed (i.e., they perceived no, partial, or full ownership of the data), probed their feelings about the disclosures, and investigated the impact these events had on their perceptions of the organization and their behavior at work. We explore these disclosure events within the framework of organizational justice, which examines how employees judge decisions by asking if they are fair. Organizational justice research has emphasized the fairness of outcomes (distributive justice), the fairness of processes (procedural justice), the fairness of treatment from others (interpersonal justice), and fairness regarding the adequacy of provided explanations (informational justice) (Colquitt, 2001). We leverage these dimensions of organizational justice to examine the impacts of organizational privacy decisions on employees who perceive an ownership stake in the data disclosed. This study dives into the complexity of organizational privacy decisions, how they are perceived by employees with an ownership claim, and how organizations can better consider such disclosures both to mitigate organizational risk and preserve their employees’ sense of justice regarding the decisions made. The study contributes to the information privacy literature by examining perceived justice of organizational privacy decisions involving data perceived to be co-owned. Both co-ownership of data and the justice perceptions of privacy decisions involving co-owned data have not been widely researched. Findings from this study could also help organizations reduce injustice perceptions related to such disclosures.

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