Shh…Let’s Not Tell Anyone Else: Team Secrecy Affects Team Innovation Through Information Elaboration

Team secrecy is an important and prevailing phenomenon that happens in most if not all organizations. While a growing body of work in social psychology has started to examine how keeping secrets can influence an individual's psychological state, we still know very little about how collectively keeping secrets can affect team processes and team outcomes. By integrating research on secrecy in the social psychology literature with motivated information processing theory in teams, we predict that collectively keeping secrets (i.e., team secrecy) can enhance intrateam information elaboration, which then leads to a higher level of team innovation. Further, we propose that this effect is moderated by the team leader's political skill, as the higher these skills, the better those leaders can bridge relationships outside the team and bring in resources to facilitate team innovation. Results from an experiment and two field studies consistently supported our hypothesized model. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.