An investigation of the effects of trade secret protection procedures and psychological contract violations on employees' tendencies to divulge trade secrets.

摘要

Organizations' trade secrets consist of knowledge or resources with the following characteristics: they are valuable, their value is tied to their secrecy, they are owned by the organization, and the organization that owns the trade secrets controls access to them. Trade secrets can be vitally important to the competitiveness of organizations. However, if trade secrets are divulged outside of the organization that owns them, they may lose much of their value to their owners. In this research, I drew upon agency theory and theories of psychological contracts in order to develop predictions of employees' tendencies to divulge their employers' trade secrets. Agency theory predicts that employees will divulge trade secrets if it is in their interests to do so, and advocates the use of monitoring procedures and incentives in order to deter employees from divulging trade secrets. Theories of psychological contracts predict that employees who are satisfied with their exchange relationships with their employers will be less likely to divulge their employers' trade secrets. These predictions were tested in a sample of 111 employees in two high-tech organizations. The results provide some support for both theoretical perspectives, although the relationships that were and were not significant sometimes differed across the two organizations and across different types of trade secrets.