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Journal of Business Ethics
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics 4/2021

06-06-2019 | Original Paper

Transparency and Control in Email Communication: The More the Supervisor is Put in cc the Less Trust is Felt

Authors: Tessa Haesevoets, David De Cremer, Leander De Schutter, Jack McGuire, Yu Yang, Xie Jian, Alain Van Hiel

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 4/2021

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Abstract

The issue of trust has increasingly attracted attention in the business ethics literature. Our aim is to contribute further to this literature by examining how the use of the carbon copy (cc) function in email communication influences felt trust. We develop the argument that the use of cc enhances transparency—representing an important characteristic of workplace ethics—and hence promotes trust. We further argue that a downside of the cc option may be that it can also be experienced as a control mechanism, which may therefore negatively affect trust. The results of our first study showed that the use of cc indeed enhances perceived transparency, but at the same time also leads to the experience of increased control. Building upon this insight, the findings of five subsequent studies consistently revealed that the use of cc negatively influences felt trust. More precisely, employees felt trusted the least when the supervisor was always included in cc (Studies 2 and 3). This effect on felt trust also negatively influenced how trustworthy the organizational climate was perceived (Study 4). We further replicated these results in two field surveys, which showed that the negative effect of cc on felt trust lowered perceptions of psychological safety (Study 5) and contributed to a culture of fear (Study 6). Taken together, our findings suggest that when transparency in email communications is experienced as a control mechanism, its use is perceived as unethical, rather than as ethical. Implications and recommendations for future business ethics research are discussed.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
In Study 2, of the 46 participants who failed our manipulation check, only one person also failed to answer our attention check correctly. Importantly, additional analyses including the total sample (N = 202; one participant did not complete the whole survey) revealed very similar results as the ones reported in the manuscript. The only difference is that, when including the total sample, the difference between the sometimes and the almost never condition also became statistically significant (p = 0.007).
 
2
In Study 3, the presence of different numbers of participants in the three experimental conditions emerged because the exclusion of participants was not equally divided among the three conditions (i.e., 24 participants were excluded from the always condition, 11 from the sometimes condition, and 23 from the almost never condition).
 
3
In Study 4, we have additionally analyzed our model using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression, to mitigate the influence of endogeneity. By doing this, we reduce the influence of omitted variables, and thus, can have more confidence in the interpretation of our results. The results of these analyses revealed a positive effect of felt trust (instrumented mediator) on trust climate (b = 0.77, SE = 0.11, p < 0.001). The results further showed that the used instruments are not weak (p < 0.001), and a Wu-Hausman test showed that the consistent estimation does not differ from the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression (p = 0.47).
 
4
For Study 5, we also ran our analyses without Item 5 of the supervisor in cc scale. A first regression analysis revealed that the degree to which supervisors are put in cc is negatively related to psychological safety (b = − 0.14, SE = 0.06, p = 0.02). A second regression analysis revealed that the extent to which supervisors are put in cc is also negatively related to employees feeling trusted by their colleagues (b = − 0.12, SE = 0.04, p = 0.005). Finally, felt trust mediated the effect between the extent to which the supervisor is put in cc and psychological safety (indirect effect = − 0.07, 95% bias-corrected bootstrapped CI [− 0.13, − 0.02]).
 
5
In Study 6, two items of our culture of fear scale had a low factor loading (i.e., less than |0.17|; see Appendix 4). Therefore, we ran our analyses again without these two items (AVE = 0.54; see Model B in Appendix 4). Critically, our mediation analyses showed similar results when we used this five-item scale. That is, employees’ felt trust is negatively related to a culture of fear (b = − 0.56, SE = 0.08, p < 0.001). And, the indirect effect of felt trust was also significant in this analysis (indirect effect = 0.07, 95% bias-corrected bootstrapped CI [0.01, 0.14]).
 
6
For Study 6, we ran our analyses again without Item 5 of the supervisor in cc scale. A first regression analysis revealed that the degree to which supervisors are put in cc is positively, but marginally, related to culture of fear (b = 0.12, SE = 0.06, p = 0.06). A second regression analysis revealed that the extent to which supervisors are put in cc is also negatively related to employees feeling trusted (b = − 0.15, SE = 0.06, p = 0.02). Finally, felt trust mediated the effect between the extent to which the supervisor is put in cc and culture of fear (indirect effect = 0.08, 95% bias-corrected bootstrapped CI [0.02, 0.15]).
 
7
We have conducted an additional study to test how the frequency of cc use affects perceptions of ethicality. In this study, we used the same selection procedure and the same three vignettes as in Study 1. After reading one of the three vignettes, we asked participants to what extent they consider the use of cc option to be: (1) ethical, (2) unethical, (3) morally acceptable, and (4) morally unacceptable (1 = not at all, 7 = very much so). The scores on these four items (items 2 and 4 reverse-coded) were aggregated into a general ethics measure (M = 4.91, SD = 1.17, Cronbach’s α = 0.90). The results showed that participants scored significantly lower (both ps < 0.05) on this measure when the supervisor was always included in cc (M = 4.35, SD = 1.27) than when the supervisor was sometimes (M = 5.33, SD = 0.98) or almost never included in cc (M = 4.96, SD = 1.06). As such, this study confirms our assumption that frequent use of the cc function indeed negatively affects employees’ perceptions of ethicality.
 
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Metadata
Title
Transparency and Control in Email Communication: The More the Supervisor is Put in cc the Less Trust is Felt
Authors
Tessa Haesevoets
David De Cremer
Leander De Schutter
Jack McGuire
Yu Yang
Xie Jian
Alain Van Hiel
Publication date
06-06-2019
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04220-w

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