Employee privacy: legal and research developments and implications for personnel administration

The contemporary emphasis on privacy has created a myriad of complex personnel problems and associated approaches to handle them. These privacy-oriented problems generally involve social, ethical, legal, managerial, and even political considerations. Personnel administrators are constantly confronted with the privacy issue. This article attempts to synthesize privacy information relevant to personnel administration, and to provide personnel administrators with managerial guidance for handling employee privacy problems in the work environment. It places particular emphasis on differentiating between ethical and legal aspects of privacy in our society, and, accordingly, on clarifying existing confusion over the impact of so-called "privacy laws" on personnel administration.