Assessing organizational silence and investigating how it affects employee’s feelings of not being valued and lack of organizational trust

Abstract

Organizational silence is an important and prevalent phenomenon for the organizations. Organizational silence is a collective level phenomenon which occurs when employees deliberately choose to withhold opinions and concern about issues and problems pertaining to their job and the organization. The reason behind withholding of opinions and concerns could be protecting from negative consequences of speaking up or the perception that speaking up does not make a difference. It develops from certain organization and managerial conditions and characteristics which are conducive to silence such as centralized decision making, lack of upward communication and managerial attitude towards employees input. The study is intended to investigate the relationship between organizational silence and its consequences; employee’s feeling of not being valued and lack of organizational trust. In addition the study is intended to investigate the role of employee demographics in shaping organizational silence such as gender, supervisory status and union membership. The study is quantitative and explanatory field research and first time going to be conducted to the best knowledge of the researcher. Target industry is public banking sector of Pakistan. Data was collected from the employees of National Bank which is a largest public sector bank. Multi stage sampling was applied and self-administered printed and e-mail questionnaires were used to collect the data. Correlation together with the regression analyses was used to investigate the relationship and the predictive affects between the variables. Study results reveal that there is negative and significant relationship between organizational silence and employee’s feeling of being valued and organizational trust. Study results further reveal that level of organizational silence is different with respect to employee demographics. The study has provided recommendations for both academicians and the practitioners.