Mine or ours: email privacy expectations, employee attitudes, and perceived work environment characteristics

In spite of the growing importance of ethical and privacy concerns in the information age, there is a surprising paucity of academic literature on the subject. The research reported in this paper attempts to address this gap by focusing on privacy perceptions related to email. We adopt a behavioral perspective on the use of email in that we treat email policy as an embodiment of managerial beliefs and values about the employer-employee relationship and the role of communication in the workplace. Specifically, we examine employee attitudes towards email, their perceptions and expectations regarding the privacy and ownership of email, and a variety of work environment characteristics. Drawing upon prior theoretical work in organizational behavior and the use of email in work contexts, we propose a variety of research hypotheses. Data gathered from a sample of 193 respondents which includes email users from two different national contexts with different email policies in the host organizations is used to test the hypotheses. While we do not examine the effects of a specific policy in this study, our results nonetheless have interesting implications for organizations desirous of constructing an email policy. Theoretical implications as well as guidelines for practicing managers are offered.