Interpersonal Privacy Management in Distributed Collaboration: Situational Characteristics and Interpretive Influences

To understand how collaborators reconcile the often conflicting needs of awareness and privacy, the authors studied a large software development project in a multinational corporation involving individuals at sites in the U.S. and India. They present a theoretical framework describing privacy management practices and their determinants that emerged from field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses. The framework identifies five relevant situational characteristics: Issue(s) under consideration, physical place(s) involved in interaction(s), temporal aspects, affordances and limitations presented by technology, and nature of relationships among parties. Each actor, in turn, interprets the situation based on several simultaneous influences: self, team, work site, organization, and cultural environment. This interpretation guides privacy management action(s).