In 2017, the New York Times broke the now widely-known scandal of media mogul Harvey Weinstein’s apparent decades-long pattern of sexual abuse and harassment. The story came as a shock to the public. However, as details emerged it became clear that Weinstein’s transgressions were not unknown to Hollywood insiders. They were, in fact, an “open secret.”
Why Open Secrets Exist in Organizations
Why do issues remain open secrets in organizations, where multiple employees know about a problem or a concern, but no one publicly brings it up? Researchers recently explored this in a set of studies. They found that as issues become more common knowledge among frontline employees, the willingness of any individual employee to bring those issues to the attention of the top-management decreased. Instead of speaking up, what they observed among their participants was something like the bystander effect, a psychological phenomena describing how people stay on the sidelines as passive bystanders, waiting for others to act rather than do something themselves. If managers want to avoid the bystander effect so that problems don’t go unresolved, they should tell employees that their voices are not redundant and that they need to share their opinions even if others have the same information.