CC’ing the Boss on Email Makes Employees Feel Less Trusted

Rampant cc’ing leads workers and managers to squander precious time sorting through unnecessary messages. New, still-unpublished research shows it can have another cost: reduced trust. A series of six studies (a combination of experiments and surveys) found that the more often you include a supervisor on emails to co-workers, the less trusted those co-workers feel. Moreover, when the supervisor was copied in a lot, employees not only felt less trusted, they felt that the organizational culture must be low in trust overall, fostering a culture of fear and low psychological safety. This aligns with other research showing that increases in transparency can correlate with reductions in trust.