When Transparency in The Workplace Is Performative, Not Real
Organizations often claim transparency as a core value, but employees experience limited information sharing without the rationale behind decisions. This disconnect between communication and participation, where employees are informed but not invo...
The concept of transparency is often presented as a key organizational value, yet the transparency that the employee actually experiences is often limited. Information is shared, though not necessarily in such a way that explains the rationale for decisions. There is a disconnect between communication and participation, where the employee is made aware of decisions but not necessarily involved in those decisions, which ultimately changes the very idea of transparency.
Transparency can be described by three key components: visibility, accuracy, and clarity, according to research published in the Journal of Business Ethics by Schnackenberg and Tomlinson (2016). These components are only partially fulfilled when an organization shares a portion of the information. The employees may be able to see the outcomes, but will not have the context in which to interpret them.
Employees have more trust in the leadership if they are aware of the process by which decisions are made, not just the decisions being made, which was shown in a study published by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turco in Organization Science (2016). The communication starts to feel curated without that context.
Image Credit: Gemini
This kind of controlled transparency is often done on purpose, as seen in studies by the Academy of Management Annals, discussed by Eisenberg et al. (2019). It states that leaders do this to make sure that they maintain power while appearing transparent. Complete transparency can sometimes reveal underlying conflicts or doubts within an organization; therefore, communication is planned in order to maintain a balance between transparency and confidentiality. This is also ambiguous for the employees in the long term, as they try to make sense of the situation, even if it is good for the leader in the short term.
Employees turn to these more informal means of communication as a result. Conversations among peers and unofficial updates tend to be more credible than more official means of communication. And so, transparency is no longer about access; it is about interpretation. Employees start to look not at what is said, but at what is not said. And in doing so, trust is redefined, which makes transparency not merely a stated principle, but a tested principle.
