Sharing Personal Health Information at Work: What is Appropriate and Expected in Organizations?

Managing private health information in the workplace has become a salient communication issue for employees, supervisors, and organizations. The primary objective of this investigation is to explore employees' perceptions of and preferences for communicating about health information in the workplace. A qualitative focus group study was conducted using Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPM) as a framework to organize the questions employees face about sharing personal health information. Forty-nine workers were recruited to participate in nine focus groups. The results demonstrate a variety of contextual influences and behaviors relating to employees' preferences for discussing health information at work. Specifically, the researchers identified five emergent themes in the data: rules for sharing private information, boundary coordination, reasons for permeable boundaries, reasons for impermeable boundaries, and organizational environment and conditions. The data parallel CPM and have practical implications for managers aiming to improve the regulation of health information in the workplace.