Best Not to Know: Pay Secrecy, Employee Voluntary Turnover, and the Conditioning Effect of Distributive Justice

Building on uncertainty management theory, we develop and test a model explicating how and when secrecy in pay communication may affect employee turnover-related outcomes (i.e., employee turnover intentions and firm voluntary turnover rates). Underlying this model is the notion that employees triangulate perceptions of pay secrecy (i.e., a pay-related procedural justice cue that also reflects uncertainty) with their own or others’ perceptions of...