You might want to think twice the next time you're considering looping your boss in on an email chain — according to studies by David De Cremer, a professor of management studies at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School, this simple choice can actually harm your relationships with your colleagues.
De Cremer wrote about the results of his studies in Harvard Business Review, and, though the findings are preliminary and the academic paper is still under review, the findings were pretty interesting.
He performed six studies — using experiments and surveys — to see the impact CC'ing others into an email had on trust.
The more often study participants included a supervisor on an email to coworkers, the less trusting the coworkers were of them.
The experimental study contained 594 working adults. They read a scenario in which their coworkers always, sometimes, or almost never copied supervisors in when emailing them and then assessed how trusted the person would seem in each situation. The consistent feeling was that having a supervisor "always" copied in made the person significantly less trusted.
"This feeling automatically led them to infer that the organizational culture must be low in trust overall, fostering a culture of fear and low psychological safety," De Cremer said.
To give some context, if you were asking a colleague about something, and the person answered your email with your manager copied in, would you think the person did it on purpose? You might not think twice about it, or you might see it as your colleague trying to undermine you. By copying in a supervisor, the person could be suggesting you can't do your job without asking for help. If this happens a lot, you might start believing your colleague is trying to sabotage you.
The studies were performed on both Western and Chinese employees, and the results were fairly consistent. De Cremer said this showed that even in very different cultures, copying in supervisors could be seen as threatening.
Of course, sometimes you include a superior into an email thread because you want confirmation you're doing the right thing. You might not mean it to come across as a power play, but it can be misconstrued as such.
De Cremer found, however, that these well-meaning mistakes are rare. When employees imagined sending emails in which a supervisor was looped in, they usually knew the recipient would probably be offended by it. The level of mistrust they thought would occur was higher when the supervisor was always copied in than when it happened occasionally or never.
This suggests that if a coworker is copying in your boss very often, the person is probably doing it strategically.
In which case, when employees say they're feeling less trusted, there's probably good reason.
CC'ing can sometimes be done under the assumption that it creates "transparency" in the workplace. But having transparency as a goal probably isn't the "Holy Grail" that organisations think it is, De Cremer says. This is because companies get hung up on making transparent information exchanges the goal, without considering the repercussions.
"Such a perception makes employees suspicious that what they say or do can be used against them, especially when supervisors and higher authorities are included," De Cremer writes.
He recommends that if supervisors want to minimise the chance of distrust forming among their employees, then they can be explicit about at what stages they should and shouldn't be included in an email conversation.
So next time you're thinking of including your manager in on a private email exchange, have a think about why you're really doing it. Before you do anything, ask your colleague whether you should get some advice from higher-up. This way the person won't think you're up to something.
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