Just keep silent… Defensive silence as a reaction to successive structural reforms

Abstract

Employees frequently have ideas and opinions on the execution of tasks or on the organization itself. Yet, sometimes employees remain silent and withhold this valuable input from their organizations because they fear experiencing conflict or controversy, causing both performance and employee morale to suffer. This article tests to what extent such fear of speaking up, referred to as 'defensive silence,' is affected by the extent of successive structural reforms an organization endures. Analyses of Norwegian Staff Surveys and of a structural reform database show that repetitive structural reforms affect employee engagement in defensive silence.

Silence and proactivity in managing supervisor ostracism: implications for creativity

“…Such attitudes may distract their attention from activities and goals that could otherwise instill an awareness of organizational problems and challenges. Furthermore, this type of behavior may rob them of any opportunity to make unique contributions, thereby hampering their creativity in organizational settings (Amabile, 1996;Wynen et al, 2020). In other words, employees' reluctance to voice their suggestions may hinder the generation of useful and novel insights that could, in normal circumstances, help improve products/services and processes and offer novel ways of solving problems at work (Muñoz-Pascual and Galende, 2017).…”

The Impact of Organizational Silence on a Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Case Study of the Electrical Industries Company

“…Therefore, organizational silence is harmful not only to the employees, but also to the organization and to individuals. Some have noted that the most common and widespread causes are the organizational climate, the organizational culture, unfair treatment, lack of confidence, lack of experience, bias, fear of isolation, and undermining relationships (Jalilian & Batmani, 2014;Wynen et al, 2019). Thus, we chose four of these reasons for our research based on the instrument we used, taking into consideration the research setting and sample:…”

Relationship between organisational silence and employee demographic characteristics: the case of Lithuanian teachers

“…The authors were among the first to use the concept "organisational silence". They created the concept of silence climate to explain how standards of the organisational culture impacted employee silence (Wynen et al, 2019). The authors suggested that employees remained silent because they knew that it was pointless or dangerous to express their opinion in the context of their organisation.…”

“…Contrary to the above, defensive silence is active behaviour of an employee (Wynen et al, 2019). This type of silence means the belief that speaking up was risky for the held position because of possible arguments, contradictions or sanctions and that this risk outweighed the advantages of speaking up.…”