There is a difference between employees not speaking up at
work because they don’t have anything to say about a specific issue and not
speaking up because they fear the consequences of expressing their ideas.
Managerial behaviour can signal employees that it is unwise to speak up. But
even when managers hold positive beliefs about the value of employee voice that
manifest in encouraging behaviour towards employees, some employees will still
be reticent to share information they believe is risky.
The Academy of Management Journal recently published an
extremely well done study by James Detert and Amy Edmondson (full citation
below) that examined employee taken-for-granted beliefs about when and why
speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate.
The authors found that “sometimes unwillingness to speak up is not
experienced as intense, discrete fear but rather as a sense of
inappropriateness; voice seems risky because it seems wrong or out of place.”
(p. 481).
Through a series of four separate studies, they identified
the following five beliefs employees can hold about authority figures that can
cause them to exhibit self-protective silence:
1. Negative career
consequences of voice: e.g. if you want advancement opportunities in today’s
world, you have to be careful about pointing out needs for improvement to those
in charge.
2. Don’t embarrass
the boss in public: e.g. you should always pass your ideas for improvement by
the boss in private first, before you speak up publicly at work.
3. Don’t bypass
the boss upward: e.g. loyalty to your boss means you don’t speak up about
problems in front of his or her boss.
4. Need solid data
or solutions (to speak up): e.g. unless you have clear solutions, you shouldn’t
speak up about problems.
5. Presumed target
identification: e.g. it is not good to question the way things are done because
those who have developed the routines are likely to take it personally.
This research is important because it shows that the boss is
not always to blame for organisational silence. Individuals arrive at work with
a set of implicit theories about work and authority figures that they learned
via past direct and vicarious experiences. The authors conclude “managers
appear saddled not only by their own actual behaviours inhibiting voice but
also by subordinate beliefs about managers.” (p. 484).
If you want employee voice to become an operational
priority, you are going to have to make changes to your selection, training,
evaluation, reward, and promotion systems. Our advice is to make employee voice
an expected, measured, and rewarded behaviour. Hire employees that can demonstrate
a proven record of coming forward with specific suggestions and solutions at
their previous jobs. Never promote to a position of management an employee that
in addition to mastering the performance expectations of their assigned job did
not also attempt to partner with managers to improve that job.
If you discover you have a manager that stifles employee
voice, help them with training but don’t promote them again until they
demonstrate that they understand how to encourage employee voice. If you
discover you’ve hired an employee with strong self-protective beliefs about the
safety of silence, help them engage in behaviour at work that directly and
specifically challenges those beliefs; otherwise, “it is unlikely that they
will revise, set aside, or develop new implicit theories related to speaking
up.” (p. 465).
Full citation: Detert,
J.R. & Edmondson, A.C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-For-Granted
Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3):
461-488.
