Article | Harvard Business Review | October 2014

The Transparency Trap

by Ethan Bernstein

Abstract

To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But less transparent work environments can yield more-transparent employees. Employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and approaches within certain zones of privacy. Organizations allow them to do that by drawing four types of boundaries: around teams of people (zones of attention), between feedback and evaluation (zones of judgment), between decision rights and improvement rights (zones of slack), and for set periods of experimentation (zones of time). By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can encourage just the right amount of "deviance" to foster innovative behavior and boost productivity.

Format: Print Find at Harvard

Citation:

Bernstein, Ethan. "The Transparency Trap." Harvard Business Review 92, no. 10 (October 2014): 58–66.

About the Author

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Ethan S. Bernstein
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Organizational Behavior

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