Place yourself in the role of a personnel director for a bank. It is company policy that neither personnel files nor copies of files are to leave the personnel office. The director of accounting and computer services is due to give his employees their yearly employee evaluations and has sent a memo to your secretary requesting copies of his employees' evaluations from the previous year. Your secretary shows you the memo. You are upset that the director would send such a memo to your secretary, because he should be aware of the policy concerning employee files.
So you decide to call the director and tell him that he is welcome to read the evaluations of his employees from the previous year in the personnel office. He tells you that he does not have the time to come to personnel and read the files and that he will speak to the president of the bank about this issue. The working relationship between you and the director has been addressed by the president before, and she has told the two of you that you need to be able to work out problems such as this between yourselves.
The dilemma is whether you should go against company policy in an effort to avoid another lecture from the president, and let the director take the copies of the evaluations to his office, or adhere to the bank's policy on protection of employee privacy.
- What are the main ethical dilemmas in this situation?
- How would you respond to the director's threat to step over you to the president?
- What would you do in this situation?
- If you had to come up with a definition of privacy in the workplace, what would it be?