Organizations that maintain secrecy over enforcement of policy are undermining their employees' trust, and the problem gets worse over time, according to a study from the University of California, Irvine.
The study, published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, finds that employees' trust diminishes over time when employers' proceedings involving policy breaches are kept under cover.
According to the report, policy enforcement proceedings are different from legal trials in that they're closed and don't have to observe due process. But despite organizations claiming that privacy is the reason for secrecy, the effect of such a policy is employee mistrust. And according to Newswise, although interpersonal trust tends to increase with experience, employee trust in their organization is the opposite, and decreases with experience.
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"The decline happens incrementally over the span of an employee's tenure with their organization when policy enforcement is kept secret from other employees," Jone Pearce, Dean's Professor of organization and management at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business and lead author of the study says.
Pearce adds, "Secret proceedings weaken, rather than support, employees' perceptions that policy enforcement is taken seriously, which then works to undermine trust in their organizations."
HR has more than one reason to care about the study results. Not only does the loss of trust occur among long-term employees — which "has important theoretical and practical implications for human resources management practices" — but that mistrust can spread, as longer-tenured employees who might be mentoring newer employees on understanding organizational values and expectations can spread that eroding trust level to less experienced coworkers and thus further undermine others' organizational trust.
A separate HRDive report says that the great majority of employees (79 percent) get their news from the office grapevine rather than from official channels, which makes such mistrust that much more likely to spread. That's particularly true since nearly half or workers (49 percent) say they're dissatisfied with communication from senior management, and most respondents (62 percent) want face-to-face communication from the CEO, either in person or via a video stream.
"Without frequent, truthful information-sharing, employees rely on each other as news sources, and gossip will fill in the void," the reports says.
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