Detrimental Effects of Remaining Silent about Operational Concerns at Work: Implications for employee outcomes

Abstract

Although employee opinions play an important role in effective organizational functioning, research shows that employees, paradoxically, tend to withhold their opinions at work. Responding to numerous calls for future research in the literature, we study the adverse effects of employee silence on employee outcomes. Using a field study and an experimental study, we advance the current understanding of employee silence and show its detrimental consequences for employees’ job performance and creativity and the mechanisms underlying these relationships. Both studies consistently showed that employees’ silence about their work-related operational concerns was positively related to their emotional exhaustion, which was then negatively related to their job performance and creativity. Moreover, they revealed that these relationships were stronger when employees’ internal locus of control and the actionability of their concerns were high rather than low.