Breaking Employee Silence via Employee Dialogic Engagement (2020)

While organizations have long recognized the importance of retaining and harvesting talents from their employees and have invested in providing policies and structures for employees to provide their input for organizational considerations, many employee polls, on the contrary, report the pervasiveness of employee silence, i.e., an epidemic of silence in which employees don’t voice important organizational issues to managers. Organization psychology and management literature generally identify two primary reasons that employees remain silent on important and relevant organizational issues: the lack of psychological safety i.e., the fear of possible sanctions for speaking up due to power differences, interpersonal risks, fear of isolation, retaliation, mockery, etc.; and the feelings of futility of voicing out. The purpose of our study is to examine psychological safety inducing factors and futility reducing factors that contribute to employee voice/silence at multi-levels (intra-personal, inter-personal, organizational and cultural levels) with the focus of developing organizational listening competency measures from the dialogic communication perspectives and to investigate crucial links between effective organizational listening and positive employee outcomes.