Abstract

As technological innovation expands the boundaries of data collection by organizations, privacy researchers must understand how employees make privacy decisions in organizational environments in which the norms that guide information sharing within and external to the organization are not always clearly outlined. With information increasing in value to organizations, and the ramifications of the release of organizational data outside of desired boundaries becoming more severe, it is increasingly important to understand the factors that influence how organizational privacy decisions are made by individuals and groups. Organizational privacy decisions can be complex, involving sharing information that multiple people may perceive an ownership stake in and who may have different preferences than the organization for whether and how it is shared. For example, consider a scenario in which a group of employees is photographed together, and the organization asks those employees to use the photo in a marketing campaign. The employees are aware of the organization’s desire to share the information externally and each employee may agree or disagree with that preference. Bélanger and James (2020) developed the theory of multilevel information privacy (TMIP), integrating theories of communication privacy management (CPM), social identity (SIT) and self-categorization (SCT) to conceptualize multilevel information privacy (I- and We-privacy). Their work described how a salient social identity may influence the privacy norms activated to guide a privacy decision. Specifically, the TMIP proposes that the social identity that is salient when the privacy decision is made will determine the privacy norms that are used to guide that decision. Therefore, if an organizational social identity is made salient through cues in the environment, the decision that results should be normative to the organization, perhaps even if the decision is counter-normative to an individual’s own information sharing preferences. In this study we seek to understand the factors that influence individual and group information disclosure preferences and gain insight into how group privacy norms develop. Drawing on SIT and SCT (Hogg & Reid, 2006), we investigate if organizational identity can be manipulated such that individuals make privacy decisions that are normative to the organization but may be counter to their personal disclosure norms. We present preliminary findings from a mixed-methods study that explored the use of environmental cues to stimulate an organizational identity and examined the influence of the salient group identity on individual and group privacy preferences. Additionally, we will discuss what factors our analysis shows may shape individual and group privacy preferences and the rules that new groups develop to guide privacy decisions.

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