3 things cc'ing a senior employee does to your staff

It’s collaborative and encourages transparency, right? Well, maybe not...

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Professor David De Cremer, KPMG Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and author of the upcoming ‘Huawei: Leadership, culture and connectivity’, revealed the preliminary findings that he and colleagues had arrived at when looking at the effect of cc’ing a superior.

De Cremer described the study: “In our experimental studies, in which 594 working adults participated, people read a scenario where they had to imagine that their co-worker always, sometimes or almost never copied the supervisor when emailing them.

“Participants were then required to respond to items assessing how trusted they would feel by their colleague. (‘In this work situation, I would feel that my colleague would trust my “competence,” “integrity,” and “benevolence”.’) It was consistently shown that the condition in which the supervisor was ‘always’ included by cc made the recipient of the email feel trusted significantly less than recipients who were randomly allocated to the ‘sometimes’ or ‘almost never’ condition.