Being Left in The Dark: The Effect of Perceived Leader Secrecy on Employee Discretionary Behaviors

We all keep secrets and secrecy plays an important role in organizational life. While a growing body of work examines how keeping personal secrets influences the psychological states of the secret holder, scant empirical work has examined the effect of perceiving oneself as left out of a secret by other important organizational actors, such as, leader. By integrating research on secrecy in the social psychology literature with psychological contract theory, the current studies examined how employee perceptions of leader secrecy can reduce leader-directed organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and voice, through employee perceived psychological contract violation. These effects were especially pronounced among employees with a low propensity to trust. Results from two experiments with different leader secrecy manipulations and one multi-source multi-wave field study (total N = 834) consistently supported our hypothesized model. Implications are discussed as well as possible limitations and directions for future research.