Many of today’s business leaders are instituting work environments that are striving for complete transparency in operations and communications company-wide. This should be a good thing, right? While these cultures are borne from altruism and sound beautiful in theory, recent studies indicate the reality can actually have deleterious effects. “Too often, the same openness that at times can increase accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, innovation and productivity can also undermine it,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
So many of today’s business leaders equate a 1:1 measurement that for every bit of transparency institutes, the more employees’ levels of honesty will increase in lockstep. In reality though, humans are not perfectly rational and having an open line of communication does not rule out bad behavior. “In fact, too much transparency may create work conditions in which employees feel their autonomy and uniqueness are being challenged. We can only expect them to rebel,” according to the Harvard Business Review.
One of the darkest possible consequences of having too much transparency is that a culture of blame metastasizes. According to David De Cremer, a University of Cambridge professor who has studied transparency in the workplace, “instead of figuring out why a mistake was made, you only know what the mistake was – and who made it.” Not surprisingly, this kind of oversight and public blame can result in an environment that breeds mistrust.
As often happens today, while in the process of creating a culture of complete transparency leaders fail to explain why it is important and how the data is going to be leveraged. Ethan Bernstein, a leadership and organizational behavior professor at Harvard Business School, has discovered employees will default to suspicion rather than altruism without proper explanation from leadership. Whereas leaders may initiate a culture of complete transparency for the sake of improving the quality of life for all employees at work, those same people he or she is aiming to help will naturally assume they are being monitored as a way to be judged and thus endure consequences for mistakes. “When we don’t know if it’s for evaluation or feedback, evaluation always trumps.” Rather than be open about mistakes to facilitate learning, employees will tend to hide errors for fear of punishment.
To counter these negative consequences, managers should consider the axiom that more transparency is not better; rather, smarter transparency is better. Leaders need to be thoughtful about the level of openness they are striving to institute. For cultures that have a high level of transparency, leaders should take pains to explain why that level of openness is needed and how it is going to benefit everyone. Leaders need to find a balance and realize that one size of transparency doesn’t necessarily fit all company cultures.