How empowering leadership reduces employee silence in public organizations

Abstract

The intentional withholding of critical work-related information can have serious negative consequences in public organizations. Yet, few studies have examined why public employees intentionally remain silent about problems and how to prevent such behaviour.This article provides insights into how managers may lower employee silence in government organizations. We develop a model that suggests that empowering leadership by frontline supervisors reduces public employee silence, by improving employee trust in their supervisors, granting employees control over their jobs, and strengthening identification with the organization. We test the model in two cross-sectional studies with data collected from all employees working in two local governments in the United States. We find empirical support for the model in both studies. We discuss the implications of the research results for public management scholarship and practice.

The Mediating Effect of Perceived Stress and Moderating Effect of Trust for the Relationship Between Employee Silence and Behavioral Outcomes

“…In addition, coworker trust was included as a boundary condition for the relationship between silence and stress to examine whether it can alleviate the effects of silence on stress. Trust has been found to be significantly related to silence (e.g., Dedahanov & Rhee, 2015; Hassan et al., 2019; Nikolaou et al., 2011). Trust towards coworkers involves positive expectations and confidence in terms of one’s fellow members’ ability, integrity, and benevolence (Mayer et al., 1995).…”

Behavioral Drivers of Performance in Public-Sector Organizations: A Literature Review

“…Park & Hassan, 2018). Although the role of leadership in empowering public employees has not yet been fully studied, some studies have suggested that positive intervention by managers symbolizing delegation of authority and display of trust in followers improves the work attitude of employees (Amundsen & Martinsen, 2015;Hassan et al, 2019;M. Kim et al, 2018).…”

Innovation, voice, and hierarchy in the public sector: Evidence from Ghana's civil service

“…Similarly, while the existence of a hierarchy is a precondition for supervisors to have this psychological reaction to their place in it, this psychological mechanism is distinct from the existence of the hierarchy itself; all organizations have hierarchies, but not all organizations exhibit widespread resistance of supervisors to employee voice. Although the psychology of leaders' openness to employee voice is widely studied in private sector management (Ashford et al, 2009;See, Morrison, Rothman, & Soll, 2011), there has been little attention to it in the public sector context, with Hassan et al (2019) as a recent exception.…”

“…Although public innovation is typically understood to take a range of forms, including new services or contractual forms (Walker, 2008), we focus more narrowly on work process reforms. Our focus on lower-and middle-level bureaucrats contributes to the small body of studies on "bottom-up" innovation and voice (Fernandez & Moldogaziev, 2012;Hassan, 2015;Hassan, DeHart-Davis, & Jiang, 2019) and on the determinants and consequences of bureaucrats' sense of control over their work, as represented within this special issue by Honig (2020) and Kay, Rogger, and Sen (2020). A deeper understanding of innovation and voice by rank-and-file bureaucrats in the literature seems especially important as Moldogaziev and Resh (2016) find that these internally driven ideas are perceived to be more successful than those imposed top-down or by external actors.…”