Distinguished Scholars Invited Essay: Are Secret Proceedings Why Longer Tenured Employees Trust Their Organizations Least?

Abstract

We address the effects of secrecy in organizational policy enforcement. First, the legal literature that explains why court proceedings are open is summarized: openness more effectively holds decision makers and claimants accountable for truthfulness and unbiased decisions, demonstrates that the rich or powerful have not bought off the weak, supports adaptation to changing norms, and enhances the legitimacy of state authority. Next, we propose that when organizational policy enforcement is kept secret from other employees, organizations lose these benefits. One reflection of these loses will be lower employee trust in their organizations the longer their tenure there. Using questionnaire data from a large U.S. governmental agency, we found that lower employee trust with tenure is incrementally linearly lower over the course of employment, not the result of an early breach of the psychological contract. This occurs for employees at all hierarchical levels but is steepest for nonsupervisory employees, suggesting that employees lack information about policy enforcement may be driving this phenomenon.

Perceived Organizational Support and Psychological Employment Contract Breach: A Proposed Model on the Mediating Effect of Trust

“…Furthermore, studies also revealed trust is another factor that significantly influences psychological contract breach [38] while contrarily, some current studies revealed otherwise [39]. Based on this contradictory results, there is an evidence of existing gap in literature concerning the relationship between perceived organizational support, trust, and psychological employment contract breach.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that trust is positively related to psychological employment contract breach and results indicated that there is significant relationship between trust and psychological contract breach [38], [53], [55]. More so, other literature review resulted in negative influence regarding the relationship between trust and psychological employment breach [39], [57] which signifies mixed result and inconsistencies in results.…”

Favoritism in the Federal Workplace: Are Rules the Solution?

“…Another way employees may psychologically distance themselves from their organizations is by having less trust in it. If favoritism in government workplaces is a violation of employees' trust in their organizations, the literature suggests that trust violations result in less trust in the violator (Folger & Konovsky, 1989;Pearce & Klein, 2017). Because merit is a core value of federal employment, we expect that a violation of this value via favoritism will be associated employees having less trust in their organizations.…”

Turnover and Recommendation Intentions in the Post-Implementation Period of Radical Decentralization

“…Executive decisions such as adopting RD provide evidence to all employees and set the tone about what these senior people believe is important for the organization (Bowers & Fleming, 2018;Muir, 2016). Organizational design changes that employees do not understand (Pearce & Klein, 2017) or that they perceive as detrimental or unproductive (Choi et al, 2018) may lead to employees questioning these decisions and negatively influencing whether the employee wants to stay with the company and/or continue to recommend the company to others (Reina et al, 2018).…”