The three primary drivers of employee silence are ambiguity, asymmetrical power dynamics and social threat.

The Need to Encourage Speaking-up Moments

Speaking up in the workplace — or ‘employee voice’ as it is called in the scientific literature — is described as the discretionary communication of ideas, suggestions, or concerns about work-related issues with the intent to improve rather than merely criticize organizational processes. Employee silence, on the contrary, is defined as the conscious withholding of issues and concerns that could be useful or relevant to share.

We propose that acts of speaking up occur on a continuum, including:

1. sharing your own ideas,

2. questioning other people’s ideas or decisions, and

3. challenging other people’s behaviour.

These three types of speaking up have much in common, with the first being easiest, and the last being the most challenging. Organizations need to do work to make all three easier for employees. In fact, focusing on speaking up across the entire continuum creates habits that make challenging conversations more likely to occur.

When employees recognize a speaking-up moment and voice their concerns, ideas or suggestions, in many cases they are seeking to improve a situation by bringing attention to it. At the same time, through speaking up, employees may fundamentally challenge the status quo in an organization and question the decisions and behaviours of those with higher formal authority. Because this may cause conflict and friction, people often remain silent or hesitate to speak up.

From a psychological perspective, there are two primary pathways to silence. The first occurs because of automatic, implicit processes, whereas the second occurs because of conscious, explicit processes. Accordingly, researchers distinguish between spontaneous, in-the-moment decisions to speak up, and decisions that result from contemplation. They contend that automatic, implicit beliefs tend to be at play during ‘in the moment’ situations at work, when employees either remain silent or speak up.

Generally, implicit processes are shaped by the taken-for-granted or implicit beliefs that often dictate individuals’ behaviour. Implicit beliefs tend to operate below conscious awareness, whereby individuals hold a belief and act automatically as a result of that belief. These beliefs develop through personal experience and through observing others.

For instance, children typically learn from their elders how to speak to those with authority, which can then inform their behaviour as adults. Moreover, individuals develop conceptual frameworks around how they are supposed to comport themselves when they interact with someone higher in authority. Because of implicit beliefs such as needing to be deferential to authority or not embarrassing superiors in front of others, employees may fail to speak up.

In contrast, conscious, explicit processes tend to be at play when employees have time to contemplate which path to choose, and also when they feel compelled to make a choice. This can be thought of as the conscious weighing of the costs versus benefits of speaking up. For example, research has shown that employees tend to express apprehension over the thought of proposing a new idea to their boss because they assume their boss is attached to the current state of affairs and will take offence at the new proposal. Ultimately, employees’ speaking-up behaviour can be shaped by implicit or consciously held beliefs, and both pathways can undermine speaking up.

Roadblocks to Speaking Up

There are three primary drivers of employee silence: ambiguity, asymmetrical power dynamics and social threat. Let’s take a closer look at each.

AMBIGUITY. Ambiguity comes into play when people don’t know whether the episode they saw or experienced is something worth addressing and, if so, whether they’re the ones who should address it. Employees often maintain their silence because they witness fellow employees remaining silent in the face of questionable behaviour or error-filled decision-making. The phenomenon in which a group of individuals witnesses a situation yet does or says nothing about it is called the bystander effect.

Remarkably, research has found that the more people who witness a negative event, the lower the chance that anyone will step in and speak up. This is because bystanders often struggle to know when and if to speak up. Indeed, when they look

around and see others who are not doing anything to intervene, they may assume that nothing is wrong, that someone else will handle it, or that the situation is less worrisome than they originally perceived.

Researchers call this ‘diffusion of responsibility’. The term applies when responsibility to intervene is not definitively assigned to one person, but instead is shared among many people and, therefore, it becomes unclear who is responsible for stepping in and speaking up. The outcome of diffusion of responsibility tends to be that no one does anything.

POWER DYNAMICS. Researchers have observed that receivers of, and observers to, questionable decisions or behaviours often downplay them for a range of reasons related to power, or the lack thereof. For example, employees may fear being labeled a troublemaker or complainer. They might experience feelings of futility, where they believe that if they speak up, it will not make a difference — leaders will not listen to them. They might be afraid of damaging a relationship with a more powerful colleague, where trust, respect, or support will be lost. And — perhaps most important — they might fear retaliation, which could result in less desirable job assignments, being passed over for promotion, or even job loss.

Organizations that implicitly or explicitly discourage speaking up perpetuate cultures of silence and fear. The model of organizational silence describes an environment in which employees — based on their observations of the workplace — craft a shared narrative in which it is either dangerous or futile to speak up. As previously mentioned, research suggests that power, status, or authority hierarchies and fear of sanction from those above pose a major barrier to speaking up. Operating rooms and airplane cockpits are particularly noted for their hierarchical and potentially silence-inducing structures.

Research on the consequences of hierarchical workplaces finds that the most common roadblock to speaking up for members in lower-power positions is, in fact, the hierarchical environment of the organization. For example, recordings from cockpits illustrate how captains ignore the tepid corrective suggestions from co-pilots who are lower in power. Add gender into the mix and the tableau becomes more complex. For example, one study investigated how the gender of the lead physician in a simulated medically critical situation (similar to that of Elaine Bromiley) influenced whether and how respiratory therapists spoke up to the lead physician. The results showed that the respiratory therapists (23 women and six men) spoke up to the female lead physicians more frequently than they did the male lead physicians. Moreover, they spoke up in a more confident and direct manner.

Why is speaking up so threatening, both for the SOCIAL THREAT. person speaking up and the person being spoken to? The reason is that our brains perceive and respond to social threats and rewards in ways that are similar to how we process physical pain. Humans are social creatures, and the threat created in a speaking-up situation creates a perceived risk to relationships and to group membership. Under threat, the prefrontal cortex — the area for executive functioning that facilitates planning, rationalizing, decision-making and problem-solving — can experience reduced capacity, because the limbic system is attempting to process the threat. The limbic system describes a set of areas of the brain believed to participate in processing our emotional responses. Experiencing a threat heightens momentary alertness but decreases our ability to see issues clearly, work with others, and think analytically.

A taxed prefrontal cortex might even leave people feeling tongue-tied, where they can’t even think of the words they want to say or they have trouble forming the words in their mouths. The very thought of speaking up to authority, let alone actually speaking up to authority, can induce such threat states and make it difficult to utilize our prefrontal cortex.

Based on our research, following are some powerful ways to encourage speaking up in your organization.

1. Perspective-taking

Perspective-taking involves the ability to mentalize or infer the mental states of others as well as one’s own mental states. It also requires the ability to understand that another person’s feelings and beliefs are separate from one’s own. A region of the brain that is critical for perspective-taking is the medial prefrontal cortex. Researchers speculate that this region helps people mentalize and predict the actions others might take.