NEW YORK, NY – No matter if you're working for the government, as a doctor, or at a tech company, almost all jobs require employees to keep secrets on behalf of their workplace. Studies show that keeping personal secrets can impact the secret holder’s psychological health, but less is known about how keeping work secrets bodes for employee well-being. However, new research by Columbia Business School Professor Michael Slepian finds that keeping secrets at work, known as “organizational secrets,” has mixed effects on job satisfaction. The study shows that keeping secrets can increase stress for employees, but also gives employees a higher sense of status, leading them to derive more meaning from their work.
The new research, Secrets at Work, by Professor Slepian, Associate Professor of Business, and his co-authors, University of Southern California Professor Eric M. Anicich and Stanford University Professor Nir Halevy, involves five studies. The research includes over 12,000 participants drawn from diverse industries and companies in the U.S. and U.K. In the first study, the researchers sampled 600 participants from Prolific Academic, an online platform that connects researchers with participants for academic studies and market research, to compare the effects of keeping current versus former work secrets. Study 1 showed keeping work secrets elevates status and therefore meaning in work, but also feelings of isolation and stress. For the second study, an experiment was conducted with a new sample of 800 participants from Prolific Academic to see if people expected different experiences at work based on whether keeping secrets was mentioned in a job description. They found that people expected that jobs that required organizational secrecy would evoke more feelings of social isolation, status, and meaning. In the third study, 600 participants from Prolific Academic recalled a time they kept a work secret or secret about a coworker and then reported their feelings about status, isolation, meaning, and stress. This showed that secrets kept from those outside the organization evoke greater feelings of social isolation, status, stress, and meaning than secrets about coworkers. For the fourth study, they sampled 800 participants from Prolific Academic to compare different types of work secrets on the same outcomes from the previous study. They found organizational secrets evoked the strongest feelings of status and meaning, compared to a variety of other kinds of secrets. Finally, they analyzed data from the 2016 Merit Principles Survey, a government-wide survey of federal employees, using a sample of 8,419 U.S. federal employees whose jobs required or did not require secrecy in the interest of national security or by a non-disclosure agreement. In this study, and in a replication study across diverse firms, they found that jobs that require secrecy are more stressful, but also more meaningful than jobs that do not require secrecy, and in turn, feelings of stress and meaning hurt and benefited overall job satisfaction, respectively. Taken together, these results show that employees experience being trusted to keep an organizational secret both as a burden and as a privilege.
With both positives and negatives of keeping work secrets, managers and company leaders should consider ways to support their employees secret keeping, by reducing workplace stress and improving relationships between employees and supervisors. Organizations should find ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of secrecy in the workplace.
To learn more about cutting-edge research being conducted, please visit Columbia Business School.
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