What are you hiding? Employee Attributions for Pay Secrecy Policies

This study examines the effect of three dimensions of pay secrecy policies (i.e., distributive nondisclosure, communication restriction, procedural nondisclosure) on employee trust in management. Drawing from HR attributions research, we propose that these pay secrecy policies are positively related to malevolent attributions and negatively related to benevolent attributions. We tested our model with 317 employees and found that attributions generally mediated the relationships between pay secrecy and trust. Employee preferences for sharing pay information moderated some of these relationships; those who are unwilling to share personal pay information did not make negative attributions of secretive distributive pay policies. Overall, these findings demonstrate the value employee attributions of organisational pay policies have for our understanding of employee trust formation.