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With the growth of social media, organizations are increasingly using personal information posted on these social platforms to screen job candidates (Clark & Roberts, 2010). Information discovered during these searches helps Human Resource professionals better assess candidates for communication skills, professionalism, and organizational “fit”, as well as bring to light any “red flags” (Becton, Walkder, Gilstrap, & Schwager, 2019; Grasz, 2009; Kasper, 2015). Many job candidates are uncomfortable with these searches on social media (Black, Stone, & Johnson, 2015), developing increasingly negative opinions of an organization with more intrusive requests (Drake & Furner, 2020). Job candidates, when confronted with a request to disclose their social media username and password to the employer, judge such requests to be immoral and respond in ways that limit damage to their privacy (Drake, Hall, Becton, & Posey, 2016). This is not unexpected because privacy breaches and information misuse are widely recognized as critical concerns to individuals (Lowry, Cao, & Everard, 2011).
However, most of these studies were conducted within a single country. There is a gap in literature as to how job candidates from different cultures might react to such requests. This gap matters because multinational enterprises (MNE) must confront local cultural expectations when hiring job candidates in different areas. HR professionals in MNEs consider local cultural variations to better match perceptions with needs. With social networking technology evolving so quickly, HR professionals may struggle to match local cultural expectations with hiring practices and concerns. With global business continuously expanding, understanding cultural differences in ethical decision-making process is becoming more important (Vitell & Patwardhan, 2008).
Particularly with social media, privacy and self-disclosure preferences differ between USA and China populations (Lowry et al., 2011). The USA and China represent the two largest economies in the world, making them both likely targets for MNE. Yet, each country contains distinctly different cultures, broadly defined as western and eastern. According to Hofstede and Hofstede (1991), the two countries have salient differences across power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. Perceived risk of disclosing personal information also impacts decisions to disclose personal information differently between western nations such as Australia, and eastern nations, such as Hong Kong (Treiblmaier & Chong, 2011). These differences also manifest themselves in the perceptions of algorithm-driven news services (Shin 2021) and mobile banking perception (Malaquias, de Oliveira Malaquias, Ha & Hwang, 2021). The differences in perceptions of information privacy breaches between American and Chinese job candidates is unknown.
Combing the ethical decision-making model (Jones, 1991; Woiceshyn, 2011) with the APCO (antecedents, privacy concerns, and outcomes) model (H. J. Smith, Dinev, & Xu, 2011), we propose that judgment of a privacy violation rests on individual characteristics and perceptions prior to the violation and results in responses that minimize or mitigate information disclosure after a breach. The theory is grounded in practice by focusing on HR professionals asking job candidates for social media account information for screening purposes, a practice that even if not widespread is documented to have occurred (O'Dell, 2012). The research questions for this study are: (1) what are the relationships among disposition to trust, information privacy concerns, judgment of moral issues, and protective responses of information privacy and (2) what are the key cultural differences that explain how national cultures react to these privacy issues.