Employee Reticence: Development and Validation of Its Scale

Abstract

Purpose of the study: The purpose of the study was twofold, first to find the antecedents and consequences of employee voice using the theory of planned behaviour, and second to develop, introduce and validate the construct of employee reticence (employee-silence attitude) and its scale.
 Methodology: Mixed-Method Research using interviews, and questionnaire was the methodology of the study. IBM SPSS 20.0 and SmartPLS 2.0 software were used for data analysis to test and confirm face validity, content validity, reliability, item reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, nomological validity.
 Main Findings: Employee reticence is a valid employee attitude. The employee silence behaviour is supported by the theory of planned behaviour. It was found that the Theory of planned behaviour applies to the situations of employee silence. The scale of employee reticence developed, as the result of this study, is valid and ready to be used by researchers, organizational behaviourists, psychologists, and HR experts.
 Applications of this study: The study is applicable for change intervention programs in organizations by organizational behaviourists. The researchers can use it to explore and develop organizational and team-level attitudes of silence. Its scale is a useful tool, largely for recruiters for ensuring PO fit. It is usable to researchers for further exploration and using it as in organizational research including but not limited to Employee silence, knowledge management, and stress. Psychologists can take the lead from the concept of ER to develop similar constructs for their field for analysing their patients of stress etc. from this perspective.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The study is novel and original as the construct of employee reticence has been developed, introduced, and validated (employee-silence attitude). Further, the scale of the new construction has been constructed and validated, using standard methods.

The Antecedents, Correlates, and Consequences of Employee Silence

“…The dimensions of ES are based on different underlying motives, that is to say, each dimension of employee silence is differentiated from the other dimension based on the underlying motives (Abd El-Fattah Mohamed Aly et al, 2021;Qureshi & Naqvi, 2021). A brief account of the dimension of employee silence based on underlying motives is presented in Table 1.…”