PERCEPTIONS OF
ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSPARENCY
OVERVIEW
This project was a quantitative investigation of how people perceive transparency in organizations and the factors that may influence their perceptions.
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MY ROLE: This research was conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation. I was the sole researcher on this project, from developing the project idea through planning the studies, conducting the experiments, analyzing the data, and synthesizing the research findings.
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BACKGROUND
In the past few years, organizational transparency has become a topic of growing interest, with increasing calls for companies to be more transparent with both their employees and external stakeholders.
However, despite the many beneficial effects of transparency, research has also shown that efforts by managers and organizations to be transparent are not always successful in achieving their intended goals.
Why might this be the case?
This project sought to investigate why transparency attempts may fail to be effective. But before delving into the problem, it was important to first consider what transparency means and define the scope of this project.
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DEFINING TRANSPARENCY
Transparency can mean a lot of different things...
Transparency can be a passive state, in which information is available, accessible, or visible.
Transparency can be the active disclosing or sharing of new or previously secret information.
Transparency can also be directed towards various recipients...
External stakeholders:
suppliers, consumers, society, government, etc.
Internal stakeholders:
employees, managers, owners, etc.
SCOPE: For the purpose of this research project, I focused on transparency as the active disclosing of information to employees within an organization.
PROBLEM
The problem with this type of transparency is that there is often a disconnect between managers who engage in transparency efforts and the employees who are the intended recipients of these efforts.
MAIN OBJECTIVE: In order to understand why transparency efforts fail, we need to better understand the recipient perspective of transparency efforts.
RESEARCH PROCESS
RESEARCH: PART I
PART I OBJECTIVE: Identify what 'transparency' means to people.
METHODS & ANALYSIS
FINDINGS
There are two components to transparency.
HOW PART I INFORMED PART II
These results suggested that transparency is about more than just the information. People also care about the social or interpersonal aspect of transparency efforts.
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PART II therefore sought to investigate how people’s perceptions of transparency efforts might be influenced by interpersonal factors.
RESEARCH: PART II
PART II OBJECTIVE: Investigate factors that may influence people’s perceptions of transparency efforts.
HYPOTHESES
(1) I predicted that the nature of the relationship between an information provider and information recipient would influence recipient perceptions of the provider’s act of transparency. Specifically, I predicted that compared to a bad relationship, a good relationship would lead recipients to:
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view the act of information sharing as more transparent and
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value the act of transparency to a greater degree.​​
(2) I predicted that this would occur because a good relationship with the provider would lead recipients to be more inclined to believe that the provider had prosocial motives for sharing the information (i.e., the provider had the recipient's best interests in mind).
STUDY DESIGN
EXPLORATORY STUDIES
Before designing the studies, I conducted exploratory studies in order to get a better sense of people’s real-life experiences with workplace transparency.
HOW THE EXPLORATORY FINDINGS SHAPED THE STUDY DESIGN
Based on the results of the exploratory studies, I used representative examples of workplace transparency to construct multiple different scenarios.
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I counterbalanced the scenarios across studies in order to ensure that the findings could be generalized to a variety of transparency situations.
PILOT TESTS
I also ran pilot tests in order to validate new measures, conducting reliability and factor analyses to ensure that the measures were unidimensional and had acceptable Cronbach’s alphas.
METHODS & ANALYSIS
FINDINGS
Participants who imagined having a good relationship with the information provider rated the provider’s act of information sharing as significantly more transparent than those who imagined having a bad relationship with the information provider.
Participants who imagined having a good relationship with the information provider also indicated that they valued (i.e., appreciated) the provider’s act of information sharing to a significantly greater degree.
Participants who imagined having a good relationship with the information provider were more inclined to believe that the provider had prosocial motives for sharing the information and thus acted with the recipients’ best interests in mind.
RECOMMENDATIONS
For more successful transparency efforts, it is important to consider not only the information being shared, but also the nature of the relationship between the information provider and recipient.
Simply being mindful of WHO delivers important information in the company can result in a…
10%
increase in employee perceptions
of transparency
15%
increase in employee perceptions that the provider has their best interests in mind
... which (existing research suggests) can in turn improve trust in the organization, employee morale, engagement, and productivity.