Communication Privacy Management: Privacy Disclosures in Manager-Employee Relationships
Stefanie L. Williams · Minds at UW (University of Wisconsin) · 2017
Keeping employees engaged in the workplace is a challenge many organizations are facing as a result of generational gaps and business climate that are in a constant state of change (Gallup, 2013). Although numerous strategies have been used to increase employee commitment towards achieving company objectives and maximizing job performance, the ability to mitigate uncertainty through manager-employee relationships is arguably a significant factor in the level of engagement displayed in the workplace (Cullen, Edwards, Casper, & Gue , 2013; Gallup, 2013). People who are uncertain of their relationships with others protect their self-image by managing the type and amount information shared since there are risks associated with disclosing private feelings, beliefs, and values (Petronio, 2002). Moving beyond transactional communication (i.e., sharing information related to job tasks) to relational communication (i.e., sharing information about personal relationships and private life) with a manager may be a key element in the formation of a relationship where private disclosures can occur, thereby strengthening feelings of safety and self-esteem critical to employee engagement. Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPM; Petronio, 2002) provides insight into the factors that drive people to manage private information with others and the decision-making process that determines the level of private information revealed or concealed during daily interactions. Understanding how managers and employees regulate private information and coordinate boundaries in the work environment, and the significance privacy disclosures have on people’s feelings of connectedness with organizational goals, work, and teams they are a part of can advance the theoretical and practical understanding of disclosures and privacy management in workplace interpersonal relations. CPM has been used to study a multitude of social situations in an organizational context. These studies include the analysis of privacy disclosures between clinicians and patients (Petronio et al., 2013), teachers and students (Hosek & Thompson, 2009), academic advisors and college-student athletes (Thompson, 2011; Thompson, Petronio, & Braithwaite, 2012), and employees and coworkers (Frampton & Child, 2013; Smith & Brunner, 2017). Although many studies on CPM focus on the significance of decision criteria in privacy disclosures, Thompson et al. (2012) expanded scholarly research by examining the relationship between the criteria and the extent to which the combination of criteria impacts disclosures. The present study aims to identify the decision criteria that influence privacy disclosures between managers and employees, and build on the idea of interconnectedness among decision criteria to understand how it converges to influence the privacy management decisions of employees.