Secrets at work

Abstract

Organizational secrecy is central to national security, politics, business, technology, healthcare, and law, but its effects are largely unknown. Keeping organizational secrets creates social divides between those who are required to keep the secret and those who are not allowed to know it. We demonstrate that keeping organizational secrets simultaneously evokes feelings of social isolation and status, which have opposing effects on employee well-being. Specifically, organizational secrecy harms hedonic well-being through increased work stress, yet enhances eudaimonic well-being through increased meaningfulness of work. Work stress and meaningfulness, in turn, have opposing effects on overall job satisfaction. These effects emerged across five main studies and two supplemental studies using correlational and experimental methods, spanning numerous empirical contexts (N = 12,211). Moreover, we replicated these effects using multiple operationalizations of our constructs and when accounting for important control variables.