I’m sure you’ve been there ....”Why don;t they just tell us?” The reluctance of leaders to share bad news or that there’s a change coming causes more problems than it solves. People hold back for good (but misguided) reasons, such as worrying about how people might react and what they might do. It’s misguided because there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the human brain treats uncertainty itself as a threat. This can sometimes be more damaging than the bad outcome people are being protected from.
But there is a dilemma. The question is rarely whether to deliver certainty or comfort. It is how to manage the balance between what people know and what they cannot yet know, because that balance, more than the content of any single announcement, shapes how a workforce thinks, feels, and performs.
The brain would rather know
Insight comes from what can only be considered unusual experiments. de Berker and colleagues (2016) placed participants in a task where lifting a virtual rock might or might not reveal a snake that delivered an electric shock. As people learned the odds, the researchers tracked their stress through self-reports, pupil dilation, skin conductance, and salivary cortisol. The striking finding was that stress did not peak when a shock was certain. It peaked when the probability of a shock sat at 50 percent, that is to say the point of maximum uncertainty. Participants who knew they would definitely be shocked were calmer than those who did not know. As the authors put it, the worst state was not knowing, not the pain itself.
This matters because it locates anxiety in a computation rather than an event. The nervous system is, in effect, a prediction machine, and it registers distress in proportion to how poorly it can forecast what happens next. Hirsh, Mar, and Peterson (2012) formalized this in their Entropy Model of Uncertainty, borrowing the concept of entropy from information theory. When the gap between competing possible outcomes widens, that is to say, when an organism cannot tell which of several futures it is heading toward then the internal “psychological entropy” rises and is experienced subjectively as anxiety. Crucially, clear goals and stable belief structures reduce that entropy by narrowing the field of live possibilities. Thus certainty, is not merely reassuring. It is metabolically efficient: coping with uncertainty depletes the mental energy that would otherwise go toward the work.
Ambiguity, not adversity, is the poison
Organizations that keep people in the dark should pay a measurable price. Sverke, Hellgren, and Näswall (2002) meta-analyzed the consequences of job insecurity across dozens of studies. They found consistent, detrimental effects on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust, physical and mental health, and, over time, performance. What is telling is that jemployees who have actually been given notice often fare better than those left indefinitely unsure. The anticipation of an unknown loss does damage that the confirmed loss, painful as it is, begins to resolve.
Bordia and colleagues (2004) sharpened the picture by showing that uncertainty is not one thing. In their study of organizational change, they distinguished strategic uncertainty (where is the organization heading?), structural uncertainty (how will reporting lines and functions change?), and job-related uncertainty (what happens to my role, pay, and security?). Each type predicted psychological strain and reduced wellbeing, and, importantly, each responded to a different informational remedy. Certainty must be delivered about the cause of the anxiety rather than in some other abstract way. Employees experiencing job-related uncertainty are not soothed by grand strategic vision statements; they need concrete, personally relevant answers.
Perhaps the most direct managerial evidence comes from Schweiger and DeNisi (1991), whose longitudinal field experiment remains a landmark. Two plants of a merging company were compared. One received a “realistic merger preview”. This was a sustained program of candid communication that included unwelcome information. The other received only limited standard updates. Employees who got the fuller, more honest picture showed lower stress, higher job satisfaction, greater commitment, and more trust in the organization, and some measures returned toward pre-merger levels. Candor about a genuinely disruptive event outperformed protective silence. The bad news, communicated clearly, was less damaging than the vacuum.
The point is balance, not the elimination of the unknown
None of this implies that uncertainty is simply bad and should be stamped out. That reading is to misunderstand the science. Uncertainty is a signal that the environment holds information worth attending to, and a workplace with zero ambiguity would be a workplace with no learning, no challenge, and no growth. You can think of it in two dimensions
- Hindrance stressors. These include things like role ambiguity, unclear expectations, bureaucratic uncertainty about how to succeed, reduced motivation and performance.
- Challenge stressors. Demanding but comprehensible goals, high workload with clear purpose.
Both are forms of uncertainty and both raise strain, yet only one corrodes performance while the other fuels it. The differentiator is whether the person can see a path from effort to outcome. Uncertainty that is navigable energizes; uncertainty that is opaque exhausts.
So the leadership task is not to deliver total predictability, which is neither possible nor desirable, but to manage the ratio. People can tolerate, even thrive on considerable uncertainty about outcomes when they have certainty about process, values, timelines, and their own standing. What they cannot tolerate is uncertainty on every axis at once, the state of maximum entropy in which nothing can be predicted and mental energy drains away with nothing to show for it. Effective leaders hold some variables steady so that others can safely remain in flux.
What this means leaders should do
- Communicate before you have all the answers. Silence reads as the 50 percent state, the most stressful point of all. Say what is known, name what is not yet known, and commit to a date by which you will say more. A timeline is itself a form of certainty (de Berker et al., 2016; Schweiger & DeNisi, 1991).
- Deliver bad news plainly rather than delaying it. The evidence consistently shows that confirmed adversity is easier to metabolize than open-ended dread. Do not soften bad news into vagueness; vagueness is the more harmful substance (Sverke et al., 2002).
- Diagnose which uncertainty people actually hold. Match the remedy to the type. Strategic reassurance will not calm someone worried about their own role. Give job-related answers to job-related fears (Bordia et al., 2004).
- Anchor stable reference points during change. Keep values, decision criteria, and process visible and constant so that unavoidable outcome-uncertainty becomes navigable rather than total (Hirsh et al., 2012).
- Convert hindrance uncertainty into challenge uncertainty. Remove ambiguity about expectations and rules of the game, then let people stretch toward demanding but legible goals. Clarity about the path, not the removal of difficulty, is what protects performance (LePine et al., 2005).
Certainty, understood this way, is not about pretending to know the future. It is about giving people enough firm ground to stand on that they can face an uncertain future without being paralyzed by it. Leaders who master the balance discover that honesty about hard realities is not a cost to be minimized but one of the most powerful, and most evidence-based, tools they have.
References
Bordia, P., Hobman, E., Jones, E., Gallois, C., & Callan, V. J. (2004). Uncertainty during organizational change: Types, consequences, and management strategies. Journal of Business and Psychology, 18(4), 507–532. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBU.0000028449.99127.f7
de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10996
Hirsh, J. B., Mar, R. A., & Peterson, J. B. (2012). Psychological entropy: A framework for understanding uncertainty-related anxiety. Psychological Review, 119(2), 304–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026767
LePine, J. A., Podsakoff, N. P., & LePine, M. A. (2005). A meta-analytic test of the challenge stressor–hindrance stressor framework: An explanation for inconsistent relationships among stressors and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 48(5), 764–775. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.18803921
Schweiger, D. M., & DeNisi, A. S. (1991). Communication with employees following a merger: A longitudinal field experiment. Academy of Management Journal, 34(1), 110–135. https://doi.org/10.5465/256304
Sverke, M., Hellgren, J., & Näswall, K. (2002). No security: A meta-analysis and review of job insecurity and its consequences. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 7(3), 242–264. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076- 8998.7.3.242