People Who Keep Company Secrets Find More Meaning at Work
Mariaelena Caputi
Summary.
This interview with Columbia Business School’s Michael Slepian explores how confidentiality at work affects employee well-being. Slepian and his co-researchers found that while keeping secrets can lead to stress and frustration, it also gives employees a sense of importance and status, making their work feel more meaningful. The study highlighted the balance between the negative and positive effects of maintaining organizational secrets and the importance of context in this dynamic.Columbia Business School’s Michael Slepian and his co-researchers, USC’s Eric Anicich and Stanford’s Nir Halevy, conducted seven studies in the United States and the UK involving 12,221 participants to better understand how confidentiality at work affects employee well-being. Using surveys and real-world experiments, the researchers assessed the psychological effects of organizational secrecy on employees’ feelings of status, stress, frustration, isolation, and purpose. The conclusion: People who keep company secrets find more meaning at work.