RT Article
T1 Do I Hear the Whistle…? A First Attempt to Measure Four Forms of Employee Silence and Their Correlates
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 113
IS 2
SP 349
OP 362
A1 Knoll, Michael
A1 van Dick, Rolf
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2013
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785647083
AB Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences.
K1 Scale Development
K1 Extra-role behavior
K1 Employee voice
K1 Speaking up
K1 organizational silence
K1 Employee silence
DO 10.1007/s10551-012-1308-4