People Who Keep Company Secrets Find More Meaning at Work

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.