Employee silence

Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence Issues that employees don t communicate upward and why. Joumcd, of Management Studies, 40, 1453-1476. 

Tangirala, S., Ramanujam, R. (2008). Employee silence on critical work issues The cross-level effects of procedural justice climate. Personnel Psychology, 61, 37-68. 

Figure 4.1 illustrates the nature of a job s safety risk profile, and what an employee can potentially encounter when they begin a new job. Education, experience, and training can prepare a new employee for normal and known safety risks. However, a number of other factors can add safety risks to a job. Figure 4.1 shows a number of these factors equipment safety issues, task assignment, workload and performance requirements, scheduling and work hours, environmental variance, co-worker behavior, supervision, and employee silence and safety voice. These... 

Employee silence and safety voicing Does the organization have a safety voicing culture Regularly assess safety voicing... 

Brinsfield, C. T. (2013). Employee silence motives Investigation of dimensionality and development of measures. Journal cf Organizational Behavior, 34, 671-697. 

Understand new employee initial behavior Manage new employee behavior and alert co-workers to Information seeking behavior Desire to change role/tasks Employee silence/voicing Random acts of helping... 

Noise can cause a serious nuisance in the neighbourhood of a process plant. Care needs to be taken when selecting and specifying equipment such as compressors, air-cooler fans, induced and forced draught fans for furnaces, and other noisy plant. Excessive noise can also be generated when venting through steam and other relief valves, and from flare stacks. Such equipment should be fitted with silencers. Vendors specifications should be checked to ensure that equipment complies with statutory noise levels both for the protection of employees (see Chapter 9), as well as for noise pollution considerations. Noisy equipment should, as far as practicable, be sited well away from the site boundary. Earth banks and screens of trees can be used to reduce the noise level perceived outside the site. 

If exiting employees are not voicing safety concerns, then the organization may not have the necessary knowledge required to prompt corrective action, and the new employee (even those with realistic expectations of the normal safety risk profile for the job type) may be about to enter a job with an unacceptable level of safety risk (beyond those normally associated with the type of work). Thus, new employee safety will be enhanced if a workplace has a safety voicing culture, where employees freely share safety information, and this is supported and reinforced by both management and co-workers. In contrast, a new employee that enters a workplace which has a silence culture, or has employees that want to voice about safety but feel they cannot for some reason, can be exposed to more safety risk than is necessary. 

In contrast to its relative silence on what constitutes an audit, the EPA detailed its concept of a compliance management system that meets the Audit Policy requirements. Such a system must have six elements, designed to motivate employees to prevent, detect and correct violations ... 

Formal methods of operation and strict hierarchies can limit communication. When information is passed up hierarchies, it may be distorted, depending on the interests of managers and the way they interpret the information. Concerns about safety may even be completely silenced as it passes up the chain of command. Employees may not feel comfortable going around a superior who does not respond to their concerns. The result may be a misperception of risk, leading to inadequate control actions to enforce the safety constraints. 

Conduct interviews — Interview the injru-ed employee and others who were at the scene. If possible, conduct the interview at the scene to reconstruct exactly what happened, and when. Verify that the injury fits the scene (don t accuse the employee of an dhing, but keep in mind that a pre-existing injury could be staged at the workplace in an effort to submit an injury claim). Do not place blame at this point, or you risk silencing the only people who know what happened. It s best to conduct the interview with an informal, fidendly, sympathetic attitude. 

Paschkis first became embroiled in conflicts of moral and occupational duty as an employee at AEG. Tasked with testing transformers as they came off the line, he identified a pattern of faulty equipment. After a few days marking defective gear, his boss demanded that he falsify the results or be fired. Untold engineers have left similar meetings in a silence that can define a career. Paschkis was righteous and lucky. He successfully pleaded his case to an executive manager who was a distant in-law, and was rewarded for his honesty with a transfer and a promotion. Nonetheless, the lack of formal recourse impressed upon Paschkis the need for collective representation, and he retold his story innumerable times to draw attention to the practical problems of conscience. 

No one listens. Concerns, ideas, and su estions may have been made but no feedback was provided and overtime employees stopped attempting to provide comment. In behavioral terms, the leadership team has extinguished the behavior of making su estions, as the consequence was resounding silence. 

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