Employee silence: Investigation of dimensionality, development of measures, and examination of related factors

• Main Author: Brinsfield, Chad T
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: business administration, management
• ISBN: 1109388640; 9781109388640

The intentional withholding of information by employees at work has been linked to many important individual and organizational outcomes. Only in recent years, however, has the concept of employee silence as meaningful beyond the absence of speaking-up become an important area of inquiry in the organizational sciences. Notwithstanding this emerging interest, relatively little is known about the underlying nature of this abstract phenomenon. In an attempt to increase our understanding of this phenomenon, a model of employee silence is presented and three related studies are conducted. The proposed model illustrates proximal and component factors of employee silence and their proposed relationships. This model adapts elements of cybernetic control theory (Carver & Scheier, 1982) and psychological field theory (Lewin, 1936, 1943) to explain different aspects of the manifestation of employee silence at different levels of abstraction. The three studies which follow are designed to: (a) investigate the nature and dimensionality of the motives for employee silence, (b) develop survey measures of employee silence based on these dimensions, and (c) use these new measures to investigate factors related to the manifestation of the various dimensions of employee silence. The results indicate that employee silence is pervasive, multi-dimensional, can reliably be measured, and is significantly related to other important organizational behavior phenomena.