Transparency has developed into an important societal narrative and also became a central theme of management and organization research. Previous research in this domain has placed organizations at the focal point of their investigation, while our understanding of employees’ lived experience of transparency practices has remained scarce. Within transparent organizations, employees gain information about others and their work, triggering them to engage in social comparisons. In order to explore such experiences of social comparison, we draw on extensive qualitative data of a group with five subsidiaries that has fostered extensive organizational transparency. We find that greater transparency led to highly diverse experiences of social comparisons in the five subsidiaries. These experiences had severe implications for the strategic development of the group, for instance affecting employees’ belonginess or commitment towards its strategy. Our paper makes three contributions to the literature on organizational transparency and Open Strategy. We add theoretical nuance to the understanding of transparency as a social process, by theorizing it as social projection surface. We challenge the normative underpinnings of transparency in the Open Strategy literature, by theorizing how transparency may have negative effects for a firm’s strategic development. And, finally, we illuminate how and why managed transparency in organizations becomes unmanageable.