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from the I-shouldn't-tell-you-this,-but dept.
Researchers from Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business have found that organizations implementing rules that govern confidential information (CI) can make it difficult for employees to fulfill their roles – resulting in rule breaking or bending.
Their paper, "Why and How Do Employees Break and Bend Confidential Information Protection Rules?" was co-authored by Dave Hannah, an associate professor in the Beedie School and Kirsten Robertson, an assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, and published in the spring in the Journal of Management Studies.
The study examined two high-tech organizations that enforce CI protection rules. It found that these rules sometimes proved to be restrictive for employees, forcing them to choose between rule compliance and working efficiently.
Employees were often required to break the rules in order to carry out their jobs effectively, or bend them in ways that enabled them to meet some rule requirements.
"Many organizations rely on CI – the formula for Coca Cola, for example – which they must entrust to employees to allow them to do their jobs," says Hannah.
"Yet as soon as employees know this CI they become a potential vulnerability, forcing organizations to put in place rules to protect their CI that employees must follow."
The researchers found that by implementing CI rules they can create three types of tension among employees: obstruction tension, making it difficult for people to work; knowledge network tension, disrupting information flow in personal networks; and identity tension, where employees cannot fulfill the role with which they identify.
The study revealed that employees react to these types of tension by breaking or bending the rules in specific ways: shortcutting, circumventing rules that slowed work; conspiring, where they work together to get around rules; and selectively disclosing, where they allow external networks access to certain aspects of the CI.
(Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Wednesday August 12 2015, @03:10PM
Yeah that's the problem in a lot of companies. The management generate endless procedures which they expect employees to follow religiously but often don't really understand exactly why they're generating them. Because business. Because professionalism. Because ISO guy.
There are plenty of good reasons to have procedures. They can improve security and they can even make a business more efficient but just indiscriminately spitting out more and more of them without knowing or caring how they'll affect day to day work is insane.
It sounds like the guy in your company just had this vague idea that some things needed to be confidential - or his own boss told him to tell everyone - without really knowing or caring how or why.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?