Underestimated_Events_in_Silence_Research_Preprint

Abstract

We highlight two conceptual and methodological threats that undermine the interpretability and validity of published findings about employee silence: The existing literature is clear that silence requires input to share, i.e. employees must have encountered relevant events to speak up or remain silent about. However, standard survey research neither examines the presence of such events nor their independent effects on outcomes attributed to silence, e.g. burnout. Re-analyzing a publicly available cross-cultural dataset (N = 8222 in 35 samples), we show that as many as 60 % of study participants might not have encountered events to remain silent about. They answer questions about the frequency and motives of silence regardless, creating ambiguous response patterns. In a second re-analysis of published data (N = 675 in 75 teams, and N = 894 in 107 teams), we show that the association between employee silence and burnout is overestimated when the independent effects of preceding events are not accounted for. Lastly, we designed a simulation based on the first two studies to examine this confounding influence of events on outcome variables under controlled circumstances. The respective distributions of event and silence frequency, the correlation between them, and the strength of the independent event effect on an outcome variable all affected the amount of bias in the estimated silence-outcome relationship. We discuss the effects of this bias on the existing literature and on the design of future studies (e.g. sample size and power), and highlight different approaches to reduce its impact on employee silence research.

Chemical recycling of polyester textile wastes: shifting towards sustainability

“…So that some industries do not include dyed or tinted plastics in their process. 27 The polyester fibres are dyed in the mass by direct dye penetration (Fig. 4), using a carrier, a solvent (swelling) and preferentially operating above the T g .…”

“…- Evonik © has expertise in high temperature depolymerisation using an autoclave. 27 However, they seem to focus on uncoloured bottle recycling, producing high quality monomers, suggesting some limitations because of polyester contaminants. However supercritical ethanol is well suited for multilayer packaging treatment, and therefore offers a wider range of perspectives than only bottle PET.…”